Fremont Indian

Visited: April 2018

I definitely want to take all my friends back to this park. It is fantastic! I used to work at a park called Bandelier National Monument, and I affectionately refer to this park as "fake Bandelier."

Bandelier National Monument in Los Alamos, NM

Bandelier protects dwellings built by the ancestral pueblo people, both pueblos on the ground and cave dwellings on the cliffside. It also features numerous walls of rock art, both petroglyphs carved into the soft volcanic rock, and pictographs painted on to some of the stronger, lighter colored faces of rock.

There are no structures left behind in Fremont Indian SP, but there are pictographs and petroglyphs galore on the volcanic tuff. (Well, there is one replica of an underground structure.)

My coworker Glynis coming out of the pithouse

Can you spot the petroglyphs?

Beautiful volcanic cliffs

I have driven past this park so many times whenever I was road tripping out to California, either from New Mexico or Colorado, most times for track races. I always wanted to stop and look at the tuff, I didn't even know there was so much rock art to see as well. I was so excited to get to go here TWICE during my work trip.

Glynis at a spiral at the top of the cliffs

The park has laminated trail guides that you can borrow. I wasn't sure if I wanted to go back into the VC after my walks/hikes, so I took pictures of the trail guides after I took them on the main trail behind the VC, and just read them off my phone.

The main trail

They called this a trilobite

Even though I've worked and lived in an extremely similar place, I still got to learn and see a lot of new things. I even earned my Junior Ranger badge :)

Cave of 100 Hands

Beautiful columnar jointing

Petroglyphs on the left and pictographs on the right