Our route was I-25 north to US 550 north to NM 4 north and east to NM 502 to US 285 south to I-25 south back to Albuquerque. NM 4 runs over and through the Jemez Mountains and makes up the bulk of the Byway.
All of this is named after the Jemez (The People), former Indians who are now Native Americans and who, with their ancestors before, have lived in this particular area for something like 10,000 years.
As NM 4 leaves US 550 it follows the Jemez River for many miles as it climbs into the Jemez Mountains. And climb it does. At US 550, the altitude is about 5500 feet. At the Valle Caldera it was 8800 feet and, as we climb up and out of the caldera, we topped 9500 feet!
All altitudes provided by "Nuvi" our friendly GPS. She has been known to deliver us to a neighborhood apartment building instead of the Rib Shack dialed in, but she usually gets her altitudes right.
The Jemez River has been working its erosion magic for thousands of years, so as we proceeded we were hemmed in by these canyon walls:
At his point these canyon walls are from 1000 to 1500 feet high.
As the term "caldera" implies (you can get your definition of "caldera" here) there has been volcanic activity in this area. One of the things that comes with volcanic activity is hot springs which usually have water very high in mineral content. As the water comes to the surface and evaporates it leaves the mineral deposits behind resulting in the formation of often surprising shapes.
In the following picture the hot spring has, over the years deposited enough minerals to form a dam entirely across the Jemez River!
As you can see, the river has not succumbed but has kept a passage open right in the center of the picture.After grinding our way to almost "the top" we found ourselves traversing an almost flat pastureland many miles across but surrounded by hills and small mountains. This sign explained it:
This is the result described:
That's about 12 miles of pasture there!
As we descended the other side of the mountain, we arrived at the Bandelier National Monument, named not after the NAs who were the residents of the canyon for hundreds or thousands of years, but for the man who first documented the history and worked to have it turned into a National Monument.
Confession time. Right here the camera battery gave up and the spare was back in the moho, so for pictures and more info on Bandelier, go here.
After our hike up the canyon to the restored NA dwellings, both on the canyon floor and up in/on the canyon walls, we were pretty well ready to just go home and that's what we did!
On the way our we were treated to our first snow capped mountains of this trip. We always welcome that sight as it makes us feel like we're really "out west" again........
More tomorrow!
MMG and DDG
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