Pueblos and Parks

Today was a day filled with great adventures.

We left Albuquerque this morning and traveled about sixty miles west to Acoma Pueblo.  (We are
listening to Willa Cather’s DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP as we drive, a book with major settings in New Mexico and Acoma Pueblo in particular.)

The Acoma people are a Native tribal group who have occupied this mesa-top Pueblo nearly 400 feet above the floor of the land for more than 2,000 years.  We had a wonderful guide named Brandon whose grandmother and parents still live atop the Mesa.  It was a beautiful visit.

The Acoma Pueblo mission church atop the Mesa.  Finished 1630.

After leaving Acoma we continued west and finished the day at The Painted Desert and The Petrified Forest both part of the Petrified Forest National Park.

One view of the spectacular range of colors to be seen at The Painted Deaert.”

We could have stayed for hours exploring The Petrified Forest with thousands of giant logs, now preserved in the beautiful agatized colors of the stone that gradually replaced them over countless eons of time.  It was impossible to imagine what gigantic forest of living trees originally fed what we see here today.