Bandelier National Monument

Bandelier National Monument protects roughly 136 square kilometers of northern New Mexico canyon country and contains more than 1,000 sites left by the Ancestral Puebloans, who inhabited Frijoles Canyon between roughly 1100 and 1550 CE. The monument was established in 1916 and named after Swiss-American anthropologist Adolph Bandelier, who systematically documented the region in the 1880s. At the canyon floor, the circular Tyuonyi Pueblo once rose three stories; carved directly into the soft volcanic tuff above it are the cavates — hand-chiseled cliff rooms used as dwellings and ceremonial spaces, still reachable today by wooden ladders. The Painted Cave in the southern backcountry preserves rare prehistoric pictographs. More than two-thirds of the monument is designated Bandelier Wilderness, crossed by over 50 miles of trails through ponderosa pine forests and remote side canyons.