The Jemez Mountains Trivia Quiz

Answer: Yes

This volcano will erupt again, but it will be a long time coming because it must rebuild its cone. The Jemez Mountains form a ring around the crater, a set of valleys called the Valles Caldera. The caldera now contains several valleys (instead of just the one original crater) because mountains are rising from the crater floor, riding the upswelling magma beneath; the largest of these is Redondo Peak at 11,254 feet. Hot springs may be found in several places in these mountains, and there are even occasional, small earthquakes. Definitely still active!

Answer: tuff

The cliffsides made of tuff have so many small, natural caves that they resemble Swiss cheese. Many of these caves were later enlarged by the Anasazi to make their vertiginous cliffside dwellings.

Answer: Rio Grande

In Mexico, this river is known as Río Bravo del Norte. Nineteen hundred miles long, flowing through a canyon that's 800 feet deep in places, it's truly a "grand" river, even if it runs a bit dry most of the year by east-coast standards.

The Rio Grande Rift Valley is a popular destination for fishers, whitewater rafters (during the spring and summer months when the snowmelt swells the river), and hikers. There's an incredible view from the mesas above the valley.

Answer: Sangre de Cristo Mountains

Spanish colonists -- Santa Fe was the second Spanish settlement in New Mexico -- saw this color and thought of the blood of Christ, so that's what they named the mountain range (in Spanish, of course). The Sangres are generally taller than the Jemez Mountains (in fact, every single New Mexican peak above 13,000 feet is located in this range), and several of them have some snowpack all year round.

The Sangres are about 40 miles east of the Jemez Mountains. On a clear day, from the same foothills, you can see as far as the watermelon-shaped Sandia Peak on the east side of Albuquerque, 70 miles to the south.

Answer: Anasazi

"Anasazi" translates to "ancient enemies." For this reason -- as well as because it is a Navajo and not a Pueblo word -- the use of this term is controversial. Some groups insist on using "Ancestral Puebloan" or Hisatsinom (Hopi for "ancestors" or "people of long ago"), but Anasazi is still a favored choice in archaeological literature and in popular culture.

The height of the Anasazi ascendance was in the period 1100-1300 AD; this was when their famous cliff dwellings were constructed and when they spread throughout the Southwest (their culture seems to have been centered in the Four Corners region). At the end of this period, the population shifted further east into larger cliff settlements that contained thousands of people.

Answer: petroglyph

A pictograph is painted onto the rock, a geoglyph is carved into the ground (by removing turf or rocks on the surface), and lithography is a modern printing method.

Anasazi petroglyphs are numerous and varied. They depict animals, alone and being hunted. Some feature people, faces, or hands; others portray gods such as Kokopelli, the hunch-backed, flute-playing, mischievous fertility god. In the Jemez region, there are plenty of places to see petroglyphs; I particularly enjoyed the ones in Tsankawi, an unexcavated Anasazi village off State Road 4 near Los Alamos.

Answer: Bandelier National Monument

Bandelier National Monument was named for Adolph Bandelier, who was the first white man to make it known to the world (he was guided there by a local, yet still got credit for the "discovery"). Frijoles Creek runs through a deep canyon to reach the Rio Grande beyond. In the cliffs lining the canyon are the ruins of a settlement that was once the home of a few thousand people. It's an easy climb to many of the dwellings, and well worth the trip; it must have been a difficult thing to haul up food and water on a regular basis, though. The park also features many miles of backcountry trails through the canyons.

Santa Fe National Forest covers much of the land surrounding Bandelier. Petroglyph National Monument is located just west of Albuquerque, covering a long volcanic escarpment with hundreds of petroglyphs. Chaco Culture National Historical Park is located in Chaco Canyon, site of one of the largest Anasazi settlements yet found, but is much less accessible to tourists due to its isolated location (at the end of over 20 miles of dirt road).

Answer: 19

The Jemez Pueblo is the only one of New Mexico's nineteen pueblos that speaks the Towa language (in which the name of the pueblo is pronounced "Hemish"; English speakers tend to pronounce the name "HEM-ase", as the Spanish would have, or "HEM-ez"). The other Pueblo languages are Tiwa, Tewa, Keres, and Zuni. New Mexico is also home to reservations belonging to the Apache, Hopi, Navajo and Ute peoples.

Because of the Rio Grande, the Jemez Mountains area contains no fewer than five pueblos: Santa Clara, San Ildefonso, Cochiti, and Santo Domingo, in addition to Jemez. Another ten pueblos are within a hundred-mile radius. Many of the highways in the area run through pueblo land, so speeders are stopped by the local tribal police and pay or contest their tickets in the particular pueblo's independent court system. This can work out to their advantage, because a traffic offense handled in pueblo court does not always lead to points on a New Mexico state driver's license!

Answer: Los Alamos National Laboratory

Although the bombs were tested a two hundred miles further south in the desert at Alamogordo, it was at Los Alamos (Spanish for "the cottonwoods") that the technology was developed. Before the war, Los Alamos was a sleepy town that was home to an outdoorsy boarding school for boys from the East Coast; the land that the boarding school sat on was appropriated by the government and never returned. The lab still conducts weapons research (including maintenance of aging nuclear stockpiles), as well as other research of strategic importance: conventional explosives, cryptography, epidemiology, and even methods for detecting biological attacks.

Of the other three answers, Sandia has locations in Albuquerque and in Livermore, California (where its across-the-street neighbor is Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory). The Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Fermilab for short, is located in Illinois.

Answer: Nothing: by law, the National Preserve remains a working ranch.

The Valles Caldera remain an important summer grazing location for ranchers in the area; as far as anyone can tell, the cattle and the elk co-exist fairly peacefully. The numbers are not huge; Preserve management generally brings in about 1500 head of cattle, although in some years persistent drought makes it impossible to sustain grazing in the area.

The park itself is deceptively peaceful, considering that it was the site of a cataclysmic eruption just 1.6 million years ago. It's a beautiful place to visit, as are the rest of the surrounding mountains. I've hoped you've enjoyed this quiz, and make sure you consider the Jemez area when you next have spare time in New Mexico!