You can climb inside 900-year-old rooms near Santa Fe, and see soot from their last fire

You can still see the soot on the ceilings

Forty miles from Santa Fe, carved into the walls of a deep volcanic canyon, are the homes of people who lived here 900 years ago. Not replicas.

Not reconstructions. The actual rooms, with the actual soot still on the ceilings from their cooking fires.

Bandelier National Monument protects more than 33,000 acres of canyon and mesa country in northern New Mexico, and it holds over 3,000 archaeological sites. Most visitors never make it past the first mile.

That mile alone will stop you cold.

Volcanic fire built the rock these people carved their homes into

Two massive eruptions of the Jemez Volcano, about 1.6 and 1.4 million years ago, buried this land under hundreds of feet of volcanic ash. That ash hardened into a rock called tuff.

Over hundreds of thousands of years, water and wind cut deep canyons through it, leaving the mesas and gorges you walk through today. The tuff came in different hardnesses.

Ancestral Puebloans figured that out fast.

They broke the harder stone into building blocks and dug their living rooms straight into the softer layers.

People have lived here for over 10,000 years

Hunter-gatherers passed through this canyon long before anyone built a permanent home here.

By around 1150 CE, Ancestral Puebloans had started settling in and around Frijoles Canyon, carving rooms called cavates into the cliff walls using digging sticks and sharpened stones.

They also stacked masonry structures on the canyon floor, some rising two or three stories. By the 1550s, drought pushed them out, and they moved to pueblos along the Rio Grande.

Their descendants live in those pueblos today, and some of those communities still call this place home.

Walk the Pueblo Loop and look up at where people slept

The 1.4-mile Pueblo Loop Trail starts at the visitor center and takes you through the core of Frijoles Canyon.

Frijoles Creek runs year-round along the canyon floor, so there’s shade and green here in a landscape that’s otherwise dry and dusty. Look up at the cliff walls as you walk.

Hundreds of cavate openings dot the rock, and inside many of them the ceilings are still black with smoke. Ladders along the trail give you a way in.

You can duck through a doorway and stand where someone once cooked dinner.

Tyuonyi held up to 400 rooms around a single central plaza

On the canyon floor, just off the Pueblo Loop, a circular ruin called Tyuonyi spreads out in a wide ring. At its peak, it held up to 400 rooms, one or two stories high, arranged around a central plaza.

One passageway connected the inside to the outside world.

Within that plaza, three round underground chambers called kivas served as ceremonial and community gathering spaces. Just outside the village, a larger ceremonial structure called the Big Kiva sits partly underground.

It measures about 42 feet across, and when you stand at its edge, the scale of it is harder to miss than you’d expect.

Long House shows you how the cliff and the masonry worked together

Stretching along the base of the canyon’s north wall, right next to Tyuonyi, Long House once combined carved rock chambers with masonry walls built outward from the cliff face.

At its height, it held roughly 300 rooms across multiple stories. Look at the rock above the wall line and you’ll see rows of small square holes.

Those are where wooden roof beams called vigas once sat. Above those holes, petroglyphs are still carved into the stone.

Animals, geometric shapes. A painted pictograph also survives here, now protected under glass.

Climb four ladders to reach a room 140 feet above the canyon floor

Alcove House sits inside a large natural cave carved into the cliff, 140 feet above the canyon floor. Four wooden ladders and a set of stone stairs get you there.

About 25 people once lived in this alcove. Inside, you can see a reconstructed kiva, the holes where roof beams once sat, and the wall niches people used for storage.

The climb isn’t dangerous, but it’s not for anyone who freezes up on heights. The view looking out from the cave across the canyon is reason enough to make the effort.

Tsankawi sits apart and still has paths worn deep into the rock

About 12 miles from the main monument, a separate section called Tsankawi gets far fewer visitors.

A 1.5-mile loop trail crosses a narrow mesa where an unexcavated pueblo of roughly 350 rooms still sits mostly untouched.

The trail follows ancient paths worn so deep into the soft tuff over centuries of walking that in places you’re stepping through grooves cut into the rock by feet long gone. Petroglyphs cover nearby surfaces.

The San Ildefonso Pueblo people trace their origins here, and the path you walk is the same one their ancestors used.

Follow Frijoles Creek to an 80-foot waterfall and tent rocks

The Falls Trail follows Frijoles Creek downstream from the visitor center on a roughly 3-mile round trip.

It starts in shady woodland, then opens into drier terrain with cacti and agaves pushing up through the canyon floor.

Along the way, you’ll pass tent rocks, which are pointed columns of tuff that formed around volcanic vents and rise from the ground like stone spires. The trail ends at the Upper Falls, about 80 feet tall.

Go in spring when the snowmelt feeds the creek. In summer, the falls can run dry.

Deer, elk, rattlesnakes and 200 bird species share this canyon

Bandelier climbs from about 5,300 feet at the Rio Grande to nearly 10,200 feet at Cerro Grande.

That range of elevation means five different life zones layered on top of each other, from semi-desert grassland up to spruce-fir forest. Deer and Abert’s squirrels are regulars in Frijoles Canyon.

Elk move through in winter. Wild turkeys and hummingbirds show up in the warmer months, and raptors ride the thermals above the mesas. Watch where you step on the trails.

Rattlesnakes, tarantulas, and horned lizards all live here too.

The Depression-era buildings are a national historic landmark

During the Great Depression, crews from the Civilian Conservation Corps built 31 buildings in Frijoles Canyon using hand-cut blocks of local tuff.

They designed everything in the Spanish-Pueblo Revival style so the structures would sit comfortably in the landscape rather than stand apart from it.

That collection is now the largest intact group of CCC-built structures in the entire National Park System. The CCC Historic District earned National Historic Landmark status in 1987.

The roads you drive in on, the trails you walk, and the furniture inside some of the buildings came from those same crews.

Stay after dark and the Milky Way fills the canyon sky

Bandelier is working toward designation as an International Dark Sky Park, and on clear nights, the Milky Way runs straight across the sky above the canyon.

Rangers lead stargazing programs and full moon hikes when the season allows.

During the day, Native American artisans sometimes give cultural demonstrations on the visitor center porch, showing traditional work in pottery and jewelry.

Inside the visitor center, Ancestral Pueblo pottery and tools fill the cases alongside two life-size dioramas of Pueblo life and artwork made during the WPA era.

Visit Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico

You can reach Bandelier at 15 Entrance Road in Los Alamos, about 40 miles from Santa Fe by way of Highway 84/285 north and Highway 4 west. Admission runs $25 per vehicle and covers seven days.

America the Beautiful passes work here. From mid-May through mid-October, parking in the canyon fills fast, so a free seasonal shuttle runs from the rim down to the visitor center.

The visitor center is open daily except Christmas and New Year’s Day. There are 53 first-come campsites near the entrance.

Pets stay on pavement.

This article was created with AI assistance and human editing.

Read more from this brand:

• 80 miles from Albuquerque, New Mexico has a lava field that looks like another world
• New Mexico’s ancient cliff village has 1,000 hand-carved rooms you can climb inside
• The Southwest’s only restored great kiva sits inside a small New Mexico city and it’s free