Bicentennial Celebration / La Bajada

The division on the second face was a government line before it was a cultural one. After about 1660 the province was split at this escarpment, with a lieutenant governor responsible for the Río Abajo, the Albuquerque country, and the distinction still marks speech and custom in northern New Mexico. The mesa above is La Majada, the sheepfold; the cliff took its name from the road down it. Colonial travelers mostly avoided the descent itself. The Santa Fe River canyon, La Boca, was the common way up, and the hill the hardest.

What the plaque says

Official Scenic Historic Marker Bicentennial Celebration This facility was built by the New Mexico State Highway Department to commemorate the bicentennial birth- day of the United States. Located 15 miles south of the plaza in Santa Fe, the nation's oldest capital city, the site atop La Bajada (The Descent) affords a spectacular view of the Ortiz, Jemez and Sang̃re de Cristo Mountains. (See Overlook Tableau) Official Scenic Historic Marker La Bajada La Bajada, or "the descent," marks the division between the Río Arriba, or "upper river," and the Río Abajo, or "lower river," sec- tions of New Mexico. This steep and dangerous grade was long an obstacle to caravan traffic going from the Río Grande Valley to Santa Fe.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Palace of the Governors — 16 mi
  The long adobe on the north side of the Santa Fe plaza, called the oldest public building in continuous use in the country, though its own founding date is in dispute.
• Bandelier National Monument — 19 mi
  Rooms carved into soft volcanic tuff in Frijoles Canyon, named for a Swiss scholar who was led there in 1880 by a man from Cochiti Pueblo.
• Fuller Lodge — 26 mi
  The upright-log dining hall of a boys' ranch school, which fed and housed the Manhattan Project after the Army bought the school in 1942.
• Valles Caldera National Preserve — 29 mi
  A crater thirteen miles across, floored with grass, left by an eruption 1.25 million years ago and owned privately for 140 years under a law that called it vacant land.

More markers nearby

• Amelia Elizabeth White and Mary Cabot Wheelwright — steps away
• Maria Gertrudis Barceló, Doña Tules — steps away
• Laura Gilpin (1891-1979) — steps away
• Three Wise Women — steps away