Our most recent exploration as ‘Adventure Kids’ took us to Duchess Castle, a short hike just off of State Road 4, a few minutes’ drive from White Rock, NM. After a quarter of a mile, you will see what is now known as Duchess Castle.
The site known as Duchess Castle is on Bandelier National Monument land and is a great place for you to introduce your own adventure kids to history, nature, and preservation all in one shot. What is Duchess Castle today, was built and inhabited by the ancestral pueblo peoples of the Pueblo de San Ildefonso, which now lies in the valley below the Pajarito Plateau. Settled between AD 1150-1200 this once-55 room site was a smaller, sister village to the one on Tsankawi Mesa (another area that is well worth a hike!). Eventually abandoned by the ancestral pueblo peoples, in 1932 the land where Duchess Castle lies was added to Bandelier National Monument, established by President Woodrow Wilson on February 11, 1916.
In 1914, two women applied for homestead applications and though they were denied they were able to lease the land from the Forest Service. Around 1916, Vera von Blumenthal and Rose Dougan established a home and pottery studio at the Duchess Castle site which was called The Fort at the time. These two women put their focus into a project to help the people of San Ildefonso improve the quality of their native pottery making and to profit from making these pieces and maintain the tradition amongst their people.
Even though their “school” only lasted for 3 summers these women had a huge impact on Northern New Mexico’s local history. The concept they used in their studio was passed on to people in Santa Fe and made the way for the beginnings of the Indian Market that still happens today.
Pottery shards can still be seen at the Duchess Castle site today, which gave us the opportunity to talk to the Adventure Kids about pottery being protected under federal law. If you see pottery, take pictures, admire its beauty, talk about the hands that crafted it, but LEAVE IT THERE. We talked with our kids about preservation of historic sites and how we don’t walk, push, or scrape on the historic stones but we talk about how the stones used for the small site were likely borrowed from the site at Tsankawi. We never vandalize a site by changing it in any way; we leave it the way we found it so that generations to come may enjoy the site as we have.
Just as a reminder to respect and preserve our historic sites, here below is a side by side comparison of what Duchess Castle looked like in 2006 and the right, what the structure looks like now after vandalism destroyed part of the structure. We want to teach our kids we can respect and enjoy our parks and historic sites if we behave in such a manner that its preserving it for future generations.
Photo from left taken from Wikimedia: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Duchess_Castle_near_Tsankawi_Bandelier_New_Mexico.jpg Chyeburashka, CC BY-SA 3.0 <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/>, via Wikimedia Commons)
When you hike with your people to Duchess Castle be prepared to be there longer than anticipated. There are a couple other more recent structures to be explored, a cistern, and the hike up the mesa for even grander views.
If you want to extend your adventure you can continue to follow the trail another quarter of a mile to the base of the mesa that lies just east of the ruins.
Here, if you have stable climbers, you can make your way up the side of the mesa for views of incredible Northern New Mexico vistas.
You will even be surprised to find some petroglyphs along the cliff walls too.
Remember!!! Explore public lands and local history with your Adventure Kids!
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