Wherein Moominmama visits the cliffside Pueblo ruins in Bandelier National Monument and gets uncomfortably close to wildfires....

Moominmama is in New Mexico, camping near Cochiti Lake, east of the Jemez Mountains. That puts me maybe 10 miles from Bandelier National Monument, except that no roads run directly here to there. To visit the archeological sites, I had to drive counterclockwise about 70 miles to enter the park from the other side.

It was well worth it! The Swiss cheese rock formations are not like the ones I saw in eastern Montana, which were left behind in compressed sandstone from a prior oceanic age. This rock is called "tuff" and it is volcanic, spewed into this region from an ancient volcano in what's now the Valles Caldera National Preserve.

The compacted volcanic ash can be carved with harder stone, like basalt and obsidian which also came from the volcano. These cliffside dwellings inside Frijoles Canyon were created by the ancestral Pueblo peoples by grinding away at the tuff by hand. 

They carved into and within the cliff sides, as above, and also built in front of them, like the picture to the right, creating holes where they could insert logs to create roofs for the rooms jutting out. You get a sense of how big the settlement was from the rows of holes that remain in the cliffs even as the buildings in front have vanished.

The ancestral Pueblo have previously been called the Anasazi but Bandelier is in the process of changing over its signage because it turns out the word comes from the Navajo meaning 'ancient enemy.' It certainly isn't the name the Pueblo people called themselves!

I remember as a child hearing stories about the mysterious disappearance of the Pueblo people from these cliffside communities, as if they'd been sucked up by an alien vacuum and whisked away to outer space.

Truth is a drought made it harder to farm on the mesas above. This despite the fact that the floor of the canyon is an oasis with a clear stream and towering pines, full of birdsong -- but limited space for planting crops. Smallpox from the Spaniards also hit hard. But survivors did not disappear, they simply moved closer to the Rio Grande river nearby. 

Cochiti Lake is next to Cochiti Pueblo, the town where one group of descendants now live. And the lake itself was created by damming the Rio Grande.

I thought by coming here in the spring, I would get to see the desert in bloom, before the hot summer made the area too dry. But the reality is that drought has become chronic, and high winds and low humidity mean fire season has started already.

Arriving here, I could see evidence of fires to my west behind the Jemez Mountains. But they were distant and blowing north.

Today, we are not so lucky and the wind is fierce, shaking the Moominhouse with violent gusts, and blowing southwest. Smoke appeared first as a colorful sun-drenched streak at sunrise today. Now it is creating an eerie sand-colored cloud moving in our direction and already obscuring the sun. 

And yes, that curved sliver of reflection on the right is the corner of the Moominhouse in the photo below.

I am told that previously burned land to our immediate west makes it unlikely the fire will reach us. But it has led to evacuations elsewhere. 

This, the Cello Pelado fire, started seven miles west of Jemez Springs, further to my west. Cochiti Mesa is under evacuation and people in Sierra de los Pinos have been ordered to be ready to go at a moment's notice. Homes have been lost. 

Cochiti Lake is now off limits to boaters and swimmers so aircraft (when winds allow)  can collect water to dump on the fires.

A second fire, the Freelove Fire, kicked up Thursday nearer to Valles Caldera National Preserve. The preserve is closed until further notice as is Bandelier.

The wind is expected to die down Saturday (it did, a little), but it is an eerie feeling to watch these clouds advance in my direction, and fire will remain a risk for as long as I remain in New Mexico.  SUNDAY UPDATE: We've been ordered to evacuate. The campground is shutting down. Fire is now 5 miles away. I am fortunate that my next stop, in Santa Fe, has agreed to take me in several days early.

It's not like my days are consumed with fear, however.  Here are a couple pictures from my visit to the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe. It turns out to be a two-month wait to get tickets to see her home and studio Abiquiu, so I'll miss out on that.  But there was a good selection of her work at the museum and information about her life.

O'Keeffe is known for the interesting ways she frames her images, among other things, and has written about her interest in peering through gaps, so it was funny to come across this photo of her peering through a hole in her Swiss cheese during a lunch stop! 

I'll end this week with O'Keeffe's brightly colorful painting: Black Hollyhock, Blue Larkspur from 1930, just because I love it.