Tijeras Canyon: New Mexico's Ancient Gateway

The canyon you are passing through is called Tijeras, the Spanish word for scissors, named for the way two drainages meet here and the ridgeline seems to cut the mountains in two. But this gap between the Sandia and Manzano mountains has been a major travel corridor since prehistoric times, used by peoples moving between the Rio Grande Valley to the west and the eastern plains for thousands of years.

During the Spanish colonial period the pass was known as Canon de Carnue, and a small settlement, Carnuel, was established here in seventeen sixty-three. Apache raids drove the settlers out in seventeen seventy-one, and it was resettled in eighteen nineteen as the threat receded. After American annexation the canyon became the route for military roads, later for the railroad, and eventually for Route Sixty-Six and then Interstate Forty. Almost every era of New Mexico history has had a version of this road through Tijeras Canyon, and the travelers have always included people moving between two very different worlds: the mountain and the plain, the river valley and the open grassland.