Saturday Site Visits, White Rock Area, NM

My apologies for the late post. Busy, sick, picking up mini-coco from ABQ airport, all those good things kept me from writing. I'm still slightly feverish, but hopefully on the mend.

I got the opportunity to drive over to the Los Alamos area on Saturday, to visit the Don Quixote Distillery with a friend. I really like their ports, and the rose wine (roses used in the making, not a pink wine), though somewhat herbal/medicinal, is good when you prefer something a little different. I'm definitely thinking of these for local gifts. The setting in White Rock is quite nice, very close to White Rock Canyon.

Afterward, we went for a little walk at the Tsankawi outlier to Bandelier National Monument. The photo below is looking east towards Santa Fe (and the beautiful fall colors in the aspen band) from Tsankawi. The reddish-buff cliffs in the foreground I believe are the Quaternary Tshirege member of the Bandelier Tuff. San Idelfonso and other Tewa pueblos claim ancestral ties to Tsankawi. I found disparate estimates of occupation on various websites, ranging from a vague 1400s to 1400-1550.

On the way back, an image of the Pliocene Cerros del Rio basalt overlying Puye fanglomerates. We had just crossed the Rio Grande, upstream of White Rock canyon. The canyon formed by the Rio Grande cutting through the Cerros del Rio basalt (yes, I'm a little late to the basalt columns meme). The canyon has been dammed on at least three occasions in the last 3 Ma both by Cerros del Rio basalts and the Tshirege member ofthe Bandelier Tuff, forming lakes that backed up into the Espanola area.

At Tsankawi, a lupine still blooms.



References: various articles, road logs in : Geology of the Jemez Region II, New Mexico Geological Society Fifty-eighth Annual Field Conference, 2007

Link: http://www.nps.gov/band/photosmultimedia/tt-vt-intro.htm