Partial cloud, sudden shower mid-afternoon
148 miles
I got up around 8.00 and again had breakfast at the motel, before packing the car and leaving town around 9.30. I took the ``low road'' back towards Santa Fe, which followed the Rio Grande much of the way to Española. I stopped to have a brief look in a visitor centre along the way, which explained the natural history of the area, and stopped again in Española to refuel.
I next headed off to the west of Santa Fe to Los Alamos, originally a small out-of-the-way town among the mountains but world-famous since the end of World War II as the Atomic City, birthplace of the atomic bomb. It remains home to the giant and somewhat secretive Los Alamos National Laboratory, which conducts research in a wide variety of fields, from maintenance of the US nuclear stockpile to projects in the medical and biosciences. On the town's Central Avenue stands the Bradbury Science Museum, named for a former director of the lab, which serves a public relations role in explaining the variety of work done at the lab over the years.
I parked outside the museum and went in for a look round, looking first at the section on national security, which was dominated by example of the casings of the ``Fat Man'' and ``Little Boy'' bombs as used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The museum explained that ``Fat Man'' was named for Winston Churchill, while a proposed but rejected design was named ``Thin Man'' after Roosevelt, which I didn't entirely believe.
The exhibits had clearly been updated since the Cold War era in an attempt to show the laboratory as more responsible, with safeguards against nuclear proliferation, the abandonment of surface and then underground testing, the means of disposal of unwanted plutonium and other waste materials and so on.
By this time it was nearly lunchtime locally, and the evening in the UK. I went outside in search of a pay-phone and attempted to call the UK to wish my father a happy birthday, which first required that I put more credit onto the long-distance phone card I had purchased the previous year. I reported that all was well, the weather had been near-perfect, and said that I would speak for longer at the weekend once I reached Maryland.
Conveniently the phone lay between the museum and a Subway, an obvious place for a bite of lunch. It took a while to be served owing to a long queue and insufficient staff, but I finally settled down to a roast beef baguette, crisps and a refreshing drink. Afterwards I took a look in the bookshop next door before leaving town for the nearby Bandelier National Monument.
The drive there took me around the perimeter of the laboratory complex, with obvious signs of tight security at the entrances, and some traces of the huge fire in 2000 which was started as a ``controlled burn'' on National Monument land but which spread towards the town owing to an unexpected change in wind direction. I was rather surprised as I drove to be treated to a sudden downpour. Since apart from the thunderstorm at Taos, this was the only rain since I reached New Mexico, I wondered whether mentioning the weather on the telephone had been a mistake, but the rain rapidly passed by and the sun reappeared.
I turned off into Bandelier National Monument, following a winding route into the heart of Frijoles Canyon, the most visited section of the National Monument. The area at the bottom was crowded, not helped by works outside the visitor centre, but I eventually found a parking space among the trees and walked over to the visitor centre for an introduction to the site.
Bandelier was designated in order to preserve a large number of archaeological sites within a small area among the volcanic Jemez Mountains. The core is Frijoles Canyon, a shady and lush valley carved out by Frijoles Creek, which was occupied by the Pueblo peoples between roughly AD1100 and 1500. The ruined houses and cliff dwellings of the canyon were discovered in 1880 by the Swiss-born archaeologist Adolph Bandelier, and are by far the most visited of the archaeological sites within the area of the National Monument -- indeed many have yet to be excavated.
The visitor centre and associated buildings are more examples of Civilian Conservation Corps constructions in keeping with the traditional local styles, the CCC having been formed in the 1930s to provide employment during the Depression. A path from the back of the visitor centre led out to the first of the ruins, the pueblo of Tyuonyi and its huge kiva. Little was left above ground level save the outlines of the walls, but originally the buildings would have been two or three stories high and housed around a hundred people.
Next the path turned and headed up into the south-facing cliff of the canyon, a mixture of rooms dug into the cliff face and the ruins of buildings in front of them. The next section of cliff bore a much longer chain of ancient dwellings, stretching for over 250m (800ft). Some of the rooms still showed traces of decorative paintings on the walls, while many petroglyphs were visible on the cliff face. At the end of this so-called ``long house'' was the one cave to retain a substantial population -- not of humans but of bats, Mexican free-tails like those at Carlsbad.
The trail then crossed the creek and ran through the forest for some way before turning back across the creek and entering a small clearing. A side trail led from here up the cliff to Ceremonial Cave, a 43m (140ft) climb up a series of steep wooden ladders. These permitted single-file passage only and a large party of schoolchildren was slowly making its way down, so I sat down for a few minutes and consumed some of the Indian bread I had purchased at Taos Pueblo.
The climb was hard work but worthwhile. A large natural hollow in the cliff face had once been the site of several houses, now gone. A small kiva still existed, and out of curiosity I climbed down another ladder into its interior. I returned to the visitor centre by following a nature trail beside the river, bought a couple of items in the the shop as it was closing, then returned to the car.
On the way back to the main road, I stopped briefly at a viewpoint which overlooked Frijoles Canyon then continued to the exit. I returned to Los Alamos the long way, via the small town of White Rock in the hope that it might look vaguely interesting. It didn't particularly, although the view on the climb into Los Alamos was worth seeing again. I was looking for somewhere to stay in Los Alamos, which wasn't as easy as in many towns of a similar size in the state, as it lacks the usual motel strip on the edge of town. I tried each of the three hotels in town and all were wanting ninety dollars or more for the night, so I politely declined and opted to head back to Santa Fe, about 35 miles away.
Several days ago I had picked up various brochures including vouchers for cheap accommodation in various places, promptly forgotten about them and so had yet to use any of them. One of them offered me a room for forty dollars plus tax at the Santa Fe Travelodge, slightly closer to the centre than the Budget Inn, so I decided to use this. I made a brief call to Jeff to confirm arrangements for Friday, then walked into the centre of town to look for somewhere for dinner. I found an Italian place named Il Piatto near the plaza, and went in for dinner. I chose a fancy salad, pasta with duck and finished off with a Tiramisu for dessert, all washed down with San Pelegrino mineral water, which proved somewhat expensive given I was quite thirsty. I returned to the motel and went to bed around 11.50.