Where the Pavement Ends

When I was in elementary school and junior high I had a budding interest in archeology that has stuck with me all these many years (as if you couldn't tell, right?). One particular topic that caught my interest was the Sandia Man Cave excavations that took place back in the 1940s but were still being discussed when I was in school. I recall that they found some of the earliest examples of woven sandals and other items that were preserved because of the dry cave conditions. These were not just a few Indian things that were a couple hundred years old....some of these things were dated roughly back to 20,000 years ago. I had a grade school level of understanding of this stuff but I did know about Clovis and Folsom discoveries and that archaeologists thought that the Clovis people were probably the earliest arrivals in North America and dated to about 12,000 years ago. That made Sandia Cave big news and controversial.

My recent visit to New Mexico afforded me the opportunity to go on a afternoon hike to find Sandia Cave located up the canyon from the little village of Placitas, which is not far from where I hope to build my house one of these days. I stopped in the Sandoval County visitor center in Bernalillo to get directions. Basically it was "drive up the canyon until the pavement ends and keep going but don't go to far -- maybe a mile....look for the parking area and maybe a little sign".  Sounded pretty simple and easy to find.

The road climbed up out of Bernalillo and through Placitas and into the Sandia Mountains following Huertas Creek. These are two very old towns. Bernalillo dates back to around 1690 and Placitas dates to the San Antonio de Las Huertas land grant of 1745. Huertas Creek flows through a steep-sided canyon wooded with pines and junipers. This is much different from the more desert-like land lower down and closer to the Rio Grande.

It was actually three miles past the end of the pavement and on a gravel road that is pretty rough even for mountain driving. Eventually there was a little parking area and a small sign. This was during college spring break and there were several cars in the parking lot and some students relaxing after a hike in the Sandias. It was a warm day and they looked pretty hot and tired. One of them grunted and pointed me toward the cave trail and I started off up the slope.

The trail looked well used and I had the mental picture of a good-sized cave. I'm familiar with Graham Cave back in Missouri that was occupied about 10,000 years ago and that cave is big enough to park a couple school buses in the entrance...so that's what I expected to find.

The trail kept climbing up the canyon wall and the view down toward the river valley was impressive.  A real estate agent would call it "a million dollar view". These cave dwellers really had a knack for real estate.

Eventually the trail turned into a ledge and the ledge became narrower until it was too narrow to pass another person. The Forest Service installed a chain-link fence to keep people from falling off the ledge....which was about 200 feet above the canyon floor at this point.  As you walked along the ledge you saw that there was a spiral stairway up ahead leading up the face of the cliff.  These cave dwellers were a very determined bunch because 20,000 years ago there wasn't a fence or spiral stairway.

At the top of the stairway was a cave. The entrance was probably smaller than a Volkswagen Beetle but I don't think I could have gotten one up there to test that theory. Inside the easily visible part of the cave was very small. My guess is that it was maybe a room eight feet wide and fifteen feet deep. There was a small crawl way passage leading back farther but this one room was all that I could see with just daylight coming in through the entrance.

The people that lived here thousands of years ago must have been so frightened of something that they decided that it was best to live at an almost inaccessible spot. In bare feet or those primitive sandals it would have taken a couple hours just to climb down to get a drink of water. They had no pottery since it hadn't been invented yet so there was no easy way to bring water up to the cave.   The view was important since they could see anybody or anything coming to visit.   

 

Inside the entrance is a rough bench of rock that is shiny probably from many generations of cave dweller butts sitting there and guarding their home.        


I was a little disappointed in what I found because my expectations were not met -- this was a pretty little cave -- but I am impressed by how these people managed to live up there. It really couldn't be done very easily now but thousands of years ago it would have been even more difficult.   How did they find this place and why? This was the peak of the last Ice Age and there would have been herds of camels and horses as well as mammoths roaming around in the river valley. It would have been tough dragging a dead horse up to the cave. 

How did an archaeologist find the place. The red arrow in the picture shows the cave entrance. When it was excavated it was mostly full of dirt and debris. Workers had to hand carry the excavated fill out of the cave and down the slope to a place where it could be sifted and carefully examined.

There is a lot more to the story of Sandia Cave. It turns out that there were persistent rumors and unresolved questions about the excavation and the dating. There was already a lot of controversy about the pre-Clovis habitation dates but the rumors that perhaps the most important discoveries were not witnessed or were maybe subject to repositioning by rodents or other cave visitors detracted from the results.    Today Sandia Cave isn't generally included among the growing list of documented pre-Clovis sites. There is no doubt that people were living in the cave but the dates came into question. The debate still goes on as to whether people arrived in North America as early as 20,000 years ago.