Cloudy with sunny spells
105 miles
I got up at 8.20, and breakfast was again included. As I was packing the car to leave, a fellow guest alerted me to a slightly flat-looking front tyre on the car. I needed fuel anyway, and made enquiries while at a local filling station, but they knew of nothing in the area that was open on a Sunday and suggested I try at Santa Fe.
I decided to carry on as planned for now but keeping an eye on the tyre, and took the interstate for seventeen miles to the northeast before taking a turn off to the north onto quieter roads, through the small village of Peña Blanca, across the Rio Grande and finally to the turnoff for Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks National Monument.
Kasha-Katuwe means ``white cliffs'' in Keresan, the traditional language of the nearby Cochiti Pueblo, and the reason for the ``tent rocks'' would shortly be apparent. The national monument is somewhat unusual in being administered not by the National Parks Service but by the New Mexico Bureau of Land Management. It is less well publicised than most, possibly on account of the fact that was only established in January 2001 by proclamation of President Clinton, just three days before leaving office. I had only learned of it myself from a calendar purchased the previous year. Access to the monument is across tribal lands. I had read online that the road was in the process of being upgraded and that the goal was to have a paved road by summer 2003. As it was, some improvements had possibly been made but the road had a fairly rough partially-gravelled surface, so I proceeded carefully to the parking area.
A short walk led me to the first of the many oddly-shaped rocks in the national monument, its shape reminiscent of that of a teepee. The landscape around me was volcanic in origin, comparatively young geologically. The many `tents' had been formed by weathering action, with harder rock at their peaks preventing the remainder from being so fully eroded.
I first took a circular trail leading around some of the tents and a small cave before taking a turning off into a side canyon, carved out by a seasonal stream. It rapidly narrowed such that it was often just wide enough to permit people to walk through comfortably, a slot canyon somewhat in the manner of Antelope Canyon in Arizona. The trail continued for some considerable distance and I found myself wondering at each turn how much further it could possibly go. Eventually it left the canyon floor and a steep climb took the trail onto a ridge above the canyon, some 200m (650ft) above the starting point, offering excellent views down and of the landscape for many miles around.
I returned to the car largely by the same route, and returned to the interstate to go a few miles further before the turnoff for Santa Fe. In the hope of finding a tyre place open, I turned off a little early, and having found nothing I stupidly tried to carry on in the same direction. The signs around were totally inadequate, merely giving the numbers of roads which were not marked on my map, no directions or placenames whatsoever. Eventually I extracted myself from this game of road number bingo onto the long Cerrillos Road, the main route into Santa Fe from the south which forms its motel strip.
I stopped at a couple of tyre places to find them closed, and decided I wasn't going to get anywhere. I found a nearby Denny's in which to have a slightly belated lunch of a Caesar salad and a ham & Swiss cheese sandwich, then continued towards downtown Santa Fe.
My guidebook suggested the Budget Inn of Santa Fe, just a few blocks south of the town centre, as a reasonable compromise between location and price. I stopped to ask for their rates and found them reasonable (just under sixty dollars a night including tax) though the most I had been paying since Chicago.
After a short while I wandered out in the direction of the city centre, heading first for the New Mexico State Capitol, a low round structure (its shape based on the Zia symbol of New Mexico's state flag). While Santa Fe is one of the USA's oldest cities, having been established in 1610 as capital of Nuevo Mexico, New Mexico was the 47th state admitted to the union (in 1912), and the current capitol building dates from 1966.
It was then a short step to the oldest buildings in the city, an adobe house built around 1200AD by the Pueblo Indians of the area, and the neighbouring San Miguel Chapel, parts of which date back to the 1610s (and its foundations were originally part of the pueblo). These are widely claimed to be respectively the oldest house and oldest church in the USA, although there are plenty who would beg to differ. Much of the church was destroyed in the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, when the Pueblo Indians drove the Spanish out of the area following the oppressive attempts to convert them to Christianity. It was another 12 years before the Spanish retook Santa Fe, and a further 18 before the rebuilding of the mission was complete.
Mass was just finishing as I arrived, and so I took the opportunity to have a quick look inside. The interior walls of the adobe and stone building were painted white, and a huge highly-painted screen hung above the altar.
I continued into the centre of the town, passing many souvenir and art shops aimed at many different depths of pockets -- some works of art bore price tags of many thousands of dollars. I looked in the main piazza, where a monument stood ``to the heroes who have fallen in the various battles with [...] Indians in the territory of New Mexico''. I could only speculate at what word had been erased from the stone face of this memorial, perhaps ``hostile''?
Nearby was the cathedral, its appearance somewhat spoilt by roadworks. Across the street stood what is surely one of the few examples in the world of an adobe multi-storey car-park (one assumes that it is strengthened by concrete internally). I continued a few blocks north to a hill overlooking the centre, taking a walk punctuated with various historical markers explaining the city's long history. At least, long by American standards -- Santa Fe was founded several years before the Pilgrim Fathers set sail, and is only marginally younger than the very oldest European settlements along the eastern seaboard.
At the top of the hill stands the white Cross of the Martyrs, a memorial to Franciscan friars killed during the 1680 Pueblo Revolt. This viewpoint offered an excellent view over the area, showing how the city lies between three mountain ranges, the Sangre de Cristo, Sandia and Jemez, over the last of which the sun was now setting.
The climb up the hill had worked up my appetite, and I headed back into the town centre to look for dinner. I went into the most exclusive hotel of the town, La Fonda, which also refers to itself as the ``Inn at the end of the Santa Fe Trail''. Inside was a large shopping complex and La Plazuela restaurant. Prices were higher than I had been used to for a few days, but not outrageous, and I chose to have garlic bread followed by sizzlingly hot beef fajitas, complete with all the trimmings. I consulted the dessert menu and chose ice-cream, although at six dollars this seemed a little on the pricey side. My reservations proved to be unfounded when it arrived, a sphere of Mexican chocolate ice-cream in a wafer cup, surrounded by artistic swirls of fruit sauces, and it proved to be delicious.
Feeling suitably well-fed, I returned to the motel at a gentle pace, and after some further reading of my guidebook, went to bed at 11.45.