Leslie and David's Wanderings: 14 April 2019 Sandia Cave

Leslie had been researching trails in the Sandia Mountains and found a short trail that leads to the Sandia Man Cave. The Sandia Man Cave, is an archaeological sitewithin Cibola National Forest. First discovered and excavated in the 1930s, the site exhibits evidence of human use from 9,000 to 11,000 years ago. It was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1961.The Sandia Cave is located on a steep side wall of Las Huertas Canyon, on the north side of the Sandia Mountains. Some of the remains recovered in the cave include mammoth, mastodon, sloth, horses, and ancient camels, as well as many mammal and bird species that survived the end of the Pleistocene period.

We took NM145 nine miles where the pavement ended and an unimproved dirt road began. The first mile, the road was not to bad but the further we went the rougher the road became. Not a problem for our truck, but there were other folks on the road in vehicles without enough ground clearance (including a Minicooper). About two miles in we found the parking lot for the cave trail. There were quite a few people taking the trail. Its only a ½ mile walk one way, but you have to climb several steps of cement stairs, then transition along a narrow ledge cut in the cliff face (don’t look down!) where you come to a metal spiral staircase that climbs up to a metal platform outside the cave. When we got to the spiral staircase, we could see there were a lot of people in the cave, so we waited at the bottom until some of them had made their way down. The stairs and platform are metal grid so a lot of people were having issues with vertigo on them. We made our way up to the cave. There was evidence of numerous fires in the cave (It looked like someone had camped in it recently as well). It was a bit small, and the back of the cave leads into a complex of caves in the cliff, but the back of the cave was blocked by a rock wall to keep people out of the cave complex. Other than that, there was not much to see. After returning to the truck we decided to continue up the dirt road which was called the “Sandia Crest Scenic Byway”. We don’t know much about it being a byway, in fact it was pretty washed out and rutted, but it was scenic! As we climbed in altitude there was even snow on the edges of the road.