Tijeras: Where the Canyons Cross Like Scissors
Near Albuquerque, New Mexico
The name means scissors in Spanish, and the geography earns it. Two canyons meet here, Tijeras and Cedro, opening like a pair of blades between the Sandia and Manzano Mountains east of Albuquerque.
This pass has been a travel corridor for thousands of years. Indigenous peoples used it to move between the Rio Grande Valley and the eastern plains long before any European arrived. When Spanish colonial administrators needed a buffer against Apache and Comanche raids on Albuquerque, they planted settlers here in seventeen sixty-three on a land grant called Canon de Carnue. An Apache attack in seventeen seventy drove the colonists back to Albuquerque, and the grant was abandoned the following year.
Permanent settlement returned in the eighteen hundreds, and Route Sixty-Six later followed the same ancient path through these mountains. Today the canyon you are passing through carries Interstate Forty along a route humans have traveled for millennia, from pre-Columbian footpaths to colonial supply roads to the Mother Road.
