The Pecos Wilderness and the Path Into the Sangre de Cristos

Santa Fe National Forest takes up a substantial portion of northern New Mexico between the Rio Grande and the eastern face of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Almost a million and a half acres of it, and at its core sits the Pecos Wilderness, originally designated in nineteen sixty-four under the Wilderness Act as one of the original wilderness areas in the national system, and expanded in nineteen eighty to its current two hundred twenty-three thousand acres of high country.

The Pecos Wilderness contains some of the highest terrain in New Mexico outside of the Taos area: Truchas Peak at thirteen thousand one hundred and two feet, the second highest summit in the state, and the headwaters of the Pecos River. The river runs south out of this wilderness, through the Pecos Pueblo ruins, and eventually into Texas, where it gives its name to a genre of cowboy mythology considerably larger than the river itself.

The Pecos Pueblo was occupied continuously from roughly the thirteenth century until eighteen thirty-eight, when the last seventeen surviving residents abandoned the pueblo after centuries of Spanish colonial disruption, epidemic disease, and Comanche raids from the east. They walked seventy miles west to Jemez Pueblo, where their descendants live today. The ruins are now Pecos National Historical Park, managed by the National Park Service adjacent to the Santa Fe National Forest boundary.

Bandelier National Monument, thirty miles west, sits in a separate unit of Santa Fe National Forest's administrative boundary and protects the Frijoles Canyon cliff dwellings of the Ancestral Pueblo people. The monument and the forest are ecologically continuous, the same ponderosa and mixed conifer forest running across a landscape that has been inhabited for at least eleven thousand years.