Palo Flechado Pass

The band the panel offers for the name comes from the record of a rescue. Juan de Ulibarrí, who names the Flecha de Palo Apaches in 1706, was marching from Taos onto the plains to El Cuartelejo, in present-day Kansas, to bring home Picuris people who had fled there after the rising of 1696. He gathered about sixty and returned them to their pueblo that September. The panel sets the Taos arrow custom beside the Apache band and does not choose between them. US-64 crosses the pass between the Taos valley and the Moreno Valley.

What the plaque says

Official Scenic Historic Marker Palo Flechado Pass Elevation 9101 ft Palo Flechado (tree pierced with arrows) Pass was used by natives and newcomers traveling from the eastern plains to Taos by way of the Cimarron River. The name may be attributed to the Flecha de Palo Apache band (first mentioned by Juan de Ulibarri in 1706) inhabiting the plains east of the mountains in the early 1700's or to a Taos Indian custom of shooting one's remaining arrows into a tree near the pass following a successful buffalo hunt.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Taos Pueblo — 12 mi
  Two terraced adobe houses facing each other across Red Willow Creek, lived in for something like a thousand years, with no electricity or running water inside the old walls.
• San Francisco de Asís Church, Ranchos de Taos — 16 mi
  The adobe church at Ranchos de Taos that artists always paint from behind, kept standing by the mud its parish spreads over it every June.
• Rio Grande Gorge Bridge — 22 mi
  A steel truss strung across a slot in the basalt west of Taos, 565 feet above the river by the careful measure and 650 by the signs, built when the road beyond it did not yet exist.
• St. James Hotel — 24 mi
  Henri Lambert's 1872 inn and saloon on the Santa Fe Trail at Cimarron, a stage for the Colfax County War, where the old saloon ceiling still shows 22 bullet holes.

More markers nearby

• Vietnam Veterans National Memorial — 3.1 mi
• Wheeler Peak — 7.2 mi
• Elizabethtown — 10 mi
• Eagle Nest Lake State Park — 11 mi