BOXES 116-117: Out West: Acoma and Gallup.

This cemetery is at the edge of a 360-foot cliff, overlooking a plain and other mesas of central New Mexico. We are in Acoma Pueblo, on the Acoma reservation, one of the places that stays most strongly in my mind of anywhere I've ever visited.

My previous post covered the first 3-1/2 days of the trip I took with Max Westler in 1978 through parts of Colorado and New Mexico on the way to California. I had never heard of Acoma before seeing a picture of it on a New Mexico roadmap, but the picture inspired us to take a 20-minute detour southwest of I-40, west of Albuquerque, to "Sky City," a village built on top of a mesa--a place of great ancestry, existing long before the Spanish conquest. (You can read about it here and here.)

The drive along I-40 was already providing spectacular vistas, with views of little homesteads and, in the second photo below, the Laguna Pueblo in the distance:

But the side road taking us to Acoma took us past even more striking rock formations and mesas:

Our first view of Acoma Village was stunning--after we realized that there were houses on top of one of the mesas we were approaching:

Until about a hundred years ago the pueblo was inaccessible except by a sequence of stairs and ladders. Now there was a road that had been engineered, though a steep one that I found a little scary to drive up (and, much more, down):

There was an office/gift shop near the entrance, along with farm structures:

After we drove to the top, we met a guide to show us around the town. (When I revisited Acoma with Anne and the kids in 1990 there was an expanded office/gift shop at the base and a bus to take tourists up to "Sky City." I imagine things have changed quite a bit more since then.) Below is one of our first views of the pueblo (Max in the lower left):

The most prominent building by far was the San Estevan del Rey Mission Church, built around 1640:

Among the homes, the most striking feature was the continuing use of kivas, the traditional gathering rooms accessible only by ladder:

The guide showed us a window made of mica, unearthed by archeologists:

Most family dwellings had one of the distinctively shaped bread ovens in their yard:

Here are three more views of pueblo streets (with Max and the guide in the second photo):

As some shots have already revealed, many of the houses had stunning views of the plains, mesas and mountains beyond. The two photos below show, first, a formation called Enchanted Mesa and second, farther to the north, the volcanic Mount Taylor, traditionally sacred to the Acoma people and other tribes. In the latter photo you may find it hard to discern where the cliff edge is--just beyond where the truck is parked!

The road down from the mesa was steep: here you see Max pointing it out, followed by shots looking through the windshield:

Acoma pottery is famous, and it was priced out of my range in the gift shop, but up on the mesa there were a couple of stands of local people selling their works at a price I could afford. I bought one vase, which I still enjoy looking at. It's the more pale-yellow colored one in the photo below:

It seems to be an older style than the two to the right of it, which Anne and I bought in 1990. The others (excepting the one to the far left, which is Hopi) were given to us at one point or another and look more commercially made (as does the cat glimpsed in the background).

I took more photos of rock formations and landscapes as we drove northwest to connect back to I-40:

Acoma Pueblo was especially amazing as we looked back upon it from this direction:

As we drove toward the Arizona border we took more photos of landscapes and of horses and their homesteads. These pictures didn't turn out as well as some previous ones, but I'll include them for the record of the trip:

Our campsite that night was below a wedge of cliffs in or near the town of Gallup:

Close by the campsite, if I remember correctly, was a stadium where a powwow was being held. We were told it was a get-together between Plains and New Mexico tribes, and it was open to the public. So we went. There were hardly any other non-Native Americans there that evening, but everyone was cordial. Of course we didn't understand most of the specifics of what was going on, but we loved the drumming and the dancing. And the food was good--notably the frybread, our first encounter. I took a lot of photos that evening: some didn't turn out so well, but I'll include most of them, if only to emphasize how rich an experience it was:

The whole day was certainly one of the most memorable of the trip. The next morning we crossed over into Arizona, but I'll save that for the next post.