More dwelling ruins! This time around Alisha and I were wrapping up our Mountains to Desert adventures with a stop at Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico. Etched into volcanic cliffs are dozens of roughly rectangular rooms, fronted by even more adobe and stone ruins. The cliffs are made of stone called tuff, and is very soft and chalky, which apparently made it easy for the ancestors to carve their homes. You can even see the post holes picked into the rock, outlining each cubby! The cliffs are also prone to small natural caves which were also inhabited, and a few of them even had the soot stains from cooking fires along the ceilings. The dwellings line a canyon carved by the baby Rio Grande, which at that point is a permanent water source in the surrounding desert. Talk about a neat place to live!
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