La Bajada

The roads the panel mentions are still on the escarpment, their traces side by side; the Historic American Engineering Record counts four alignments over it between 1598 and 1932. Heavy freight wagons could not take La Bajada until the 1860s. The twentieth-century auto road climbed it in barely a mile and a half with some two dozen hairpin turns, and a spot on it is still called Florida for a truckload of oranges that overturned there. Route 66 used it from 1926 until 1932, when the highway moved about three miles east, near today's I-25.

What the plaque says

Official Scenic Historic Marker La Bajada This black volcanic escarpment is one of New Mexico's most important landmarks. The descent (bajada) of this escarpment marked the traditional division between New Mexico's upper (Rio Arriba) and lower (Rio Abajo) districts. Over the centuries, several trails and roads were developed to overcome this most difficult of the obstacles along the Camino Real.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Bandelier National Monument — 16 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.
• Palace of the Governors — 22 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.
• Fuller Lodge — 24 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 — 25 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

• Pueblo of Santo Domingo Kiua — 4.2 mi
• Kewa Women's Co-op — 4.9 mi
• Women of Cochiti — 6.7 mi
• Gold and Turquoise — 6.9 mi