New Mexico New Deal Sites June 2019 - Photo #119 - Bandelier National Monument

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Bandelier Historic District, New Mexico, June 21, 2019: The entrance to Bandelier National Monument in Frijoles Canyon, in the wilderness between Los Alamos, Valles Caldera National Preserve, el Pueblo de Cochiti, and Santa Fe National Forest, about 50 miles north-northeast of Albuquerque, and 38 miles east of Jémez Springs.

Bandelier is home to spectacular scenery, abundant wildlife, and to thousands of ancient Pueblo cliff dwellings. It was almost totally inaccessible until the New Deal, when the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) built access roads, paths, hiking trails, picnic areas, bridges, a visitor center, a lodge, a dining room, Park Service residences, and hand-made furniture and punched-tin lighting fixtures for all the buildings[1,2,3]. The CCC created 31 Pueblo Revival structures here, including the check-in building shown above[6]; it's the largest collection of CCC buildings in the National Parks system[4]. The Civil Works Works Administration (CWA) also worked on the monument, widening the 12-foot CCC truck trail to 22 feet[7].

References
  1. Bandelier National Monument, Wikipedia, accessed 12 July 2019.
  2. Bandelier CCC Walking Tour Intro, National Park Service website, accessed 12 July 2019.
  3. Historic CCC Photos of Bandelier,National Park Service website, accessed 12 July 2019.
  4. CCC Makes History at Bandelier, Living New Deal website, accessed 12 July 2019.
  5. Harvey H. Kaiser, The National Park Architecture Sourcebook, Princeton Architectural Press (2008).
  6. Paul R. Secord, Bandelier National Monument, Arcadia Publishing (2016). Images of America series, includes dozens of photos of the CCC construction project. On p.115 it states that "the check-in building off of Highway 4 was constructed in 1940", i.e. during the CCC project that lasted from 1933 to mid-1941.