It was weird driving up to Petroglyphs National Monument because it is truly in the middle of some residential streets in Albuquerque. Across the street from the visitor’s center and again down the road where we hiked along the path of petroglyphs are houses. Just regular old suburbia!
The environment is the typical grassland high desert. Albuquerque is still in the zone of the 5 seasons- winter, spring, summer, monsoon, and autumn. So there is a lot of creosote and some cacti, desert grasses and rocks. So many rocks! This area is “surrounded” by 5 volcanoes 🌋 that are of high spiritual significance to the Pueblo peoples. They are part of their origination stories. This park is covered in pretty large rocks from one of these volcanoes. The rocks themselves are a grayish color, but then covered in a black patina from the sand and desert sun. So they are ideal rocks to carve into because once you get below the patina it is gray “writing” on black rocks!
The trail we took is in a valley that was probably a natural pathway of travel for multiple tribes of the Pueblo peoples. The thought is that some of these rocks were directional signs, but most were spiritual. Weirdly, some are covered by Spanish religious symbolism also from the original Camino Real that comes through this region. So it is almost like priestly graffiti! And then unfortunately there is actual graffiti but most seems to be prior to the 19802. A lot from the 1930 and 1940s. The people would sign their name and put the date!😡
We actually stayed just outside of Albuquerque in a small city called Bernalillo. It was a County park and again quite cheap and pretty nice. But it was on 2 main roads so a little noisy for light sleeper me. We actually were right behind a microbrewery which blocked some of the noise until garbage pickup at 6 am. Oh well! More about Albuquerque next time!
