Just about anyone who lives in the Los Alamos area recognizes the stunning scenery that we live among daily. Who can ignore the view from the Main Hill Road, looking at the beautiful cliffs, canyons, and distant mountains? But how many people know that there was a big movement to create a new national park in the Los Alamos area before the Manhattan Project?
Between 1905 and 1930, various bills in Congress would have created a national park in the Los Alamos area. Had the bills passed, the Manhattan Project and LANL likely would have been located elsewhere.
Bandelier National Monument, just south of Los Alamos, protects a stunning array of archeological sites including places where prehistoric Pueblo people built hundreds of stone houses against cliff faces, and built many small and large villages scattered across a landscape of deep canyons and long mesas. Yet these same cultural and natural features populate the Pajarito Plateau from Cochiti Pueblo to Santa Clara Canyon to the north.
Bandelier National Monument has the highest density of archeological sites of any area of the national park system. Yet those same features surround Los Alamos in every direction. You can walk a couple of miles north from Redija Canon and find a huge Pueblo ruin on US Forest Service Land. Right next to White Rock and the guard stations of Pajarito Road, one of the largest and most significant prehistoric Pueblo village ruins quietly overlooks the new high-density subdivision. Pueblo artifacts dot LANL lands, especially in Pajarito Canyon.
Combined with the highly unusual geology created by the massive eruption of the Jemez Volcano, 1.2 million years ago, these cultural sites drew the attention of scientists, politicians, and land managers at the turn of the century. Between 1901 and 1930 policy makers tried to create a national park called the “Cliff Dwellers National Park,” or the “Pajarito National Park.” The rational was to advance science, increase tourism and protect archeological sites from looting which was rampant at the time.
While the area was and is worthy of national park status, Congress got distracted by other issues right when it seemed the Cliff Dwellers National Park bill was gaining steam. Some people worried that the Pajarito site was too like Mesa Verde National Park in Southwest Colorado. Others favored using the Pajarito area for logging and sheep grazing, while others said that area chosen for the park was too big or too remote. The proposal also got caught up in the ongoing turf battled between the National Park Service and the US Forest Service, a tug-of-war that continues to this day.
Nationally famous archeologist Edgar Lee Hewett spoke out strongly against the plunder of archaeological sites on the Pajarito Plateau and elsewhere in the Southwest. Richard Weatherill who had been taking artifacts from Mesa Verde, Chaco Canyon, and other San Juan Basin sites to sell to collectors drew the wrath of Hewett and federal officials. Hewett helped designate Chaco Canyon National Historic Park in 1906 and spotlighted vandalism at Ottowi Pueblo (ruin) in Bayo Canyon off the Los Alamos Main Hill Road. Ultimately Hewett championed and wrote the Antiquities Act of 1906 which allows a president to designate a national monument without Congressional consent, a needed law to protect places like Bandelier, Bears Ears, and hundreds of other places over the last century.
The Pajarito National Park would have encompassed the area where Los Alamos sits today. When the park was under serious consideration around 1905, even the Los Alamos Ranch School didn’t exist yet and the Los Alamos area was inhabited by shepherds, loggers, small plot farmers, and federal land managers. Had the park been established by Congress, the Manhattan Project probably would have happened somewhere else entirely.
Later iterations of the Cliff Dwellers/Pajarito National Park idea even encompassed the Valles Caldera (which was finally added to the national park system in 2014). Park boosters focused on money from tourism and protection of delicate archeological sites. But their efforts floundered in disagreement.
President Woodrow Wilson established Bandelier National Monument in 1916 after the national park campaign faded. Bandelier’s main section south of Los Alamos encompassed about 23,000 acres of land but the Monument also had a northern section that included Tsankawi Mesa and the Bayo Canyon area below the Main Hill Road where significant Pueblo artifacts including Otowi Ruin and early historic sites exist in a beautiful landscape. Called the “Otowi Section,” the Bayo Canyon acerage was transferred to the Atomic Energy Commission in 1963 after Los Alamos residents vandalized the ruins and the National Park Service felt unable to protect the area from Laboratory and public activity.
Today Tsankawi Mesa and 900 acres of land around it are part of Bandelier. The main Bandelier National Monument is now about 34,000 acres thanks to additions made over the years.
The National Park Service has substantial interest in the Pajarito Plateau and Jemez Mountains with their Manhattan Project National Historic Park, which owns no land but cooperates with the DOE on protecting historic sites and interpreting them to the public. The Park Service manages almost 90,000 acres at the Valles Caldera National Preserve and, of course, Bandelier National Monument. We all benefit greatly from these excellent national lands.
