VOICE ONE:

The path continues past the ruins of the old pueblo up toward the reddish brown wall of Frijoles Canyon. There are many openings in the rock wall. The canyon walls are made of a soft rock called tuff.

Tuff is made of ash from the explosions of the Jemez volcano. After thousands of years the ash became a soft rock. Through the years rain and wind made cracks and openings in it. The ancestral Pueblo people used stone tools to widen the small natural openings in the face of the canyon walls.

Visitors can climb up wood ladders to see the inside of several of the cave homes. The ceilings are black from smoke. From a cave room you can see far up and down the canyon and imagine what life was like there seven hundred years ago. Farther up the path are more cave homes with ruins of small stone rooms next to the wall of the canyon. Along the walls and in the caves are designs or symbols carved into the rock or painted on it.

VOICE TWO:

You can see many other ruins by following the more than one hundred kilometers of trails in Bandelier. Archeologists know that the ancestors of today’s Pueblo Indians lived in the Frijoles Canyon for more than four hundred years.

They also know that by the middle fifteen hundreds people left their villages and cave homes and moved south and east toward the Rio Grande River. No one is sure why. Modern Pueblo Indians say they feel a strong link to the spirit of their ancestors in Bandelier National Monument.