Pecos National Historical Park

Pecos Pueblo stood on a long rocky ridge above Glorieta Creek, at the gap where the Rio Grande country opens onto the plains. At its height it held more than two thousand people in a terraced town five stories tall. Its walls are low mounds along the ridge now, traced by a loop trail of about a mile and a quarter from the visitor center.

The ruin everyone photographs is the church. In the 1620s Franciscans had the people of Pecos build an enormous adobe mission, the largest and most imposing in New Mexico, and in the revolt of 1680 they tore it down. In front of where it had stood they built a kiva, an answer that could not be misread. After the Spanish came back, a much smaller church was raised in 1717 on the old foundations, and its red adobe walls stand today inside the outline of the first. The kiva is a few steps away.

The park takes in two later chapters. The Glorieta Pass battlefield is reached on a loop trail of about two and a quarter miles; ask at the visitor center for access. Forked Lightning Ranch was a dude ranch Tex Austin ran from 1925, its house designed by John Gaw Meem, with the old Kozlowski's trading post of the Santa Fe Trail on its land. The oilman Buddy Fogelson and his wife, the actress Greer Garson, later kept it as their ranch, and after his death she arranged for it to go to the park rather than to developers. The ranch house is seen on guided tours.

Pecos became a state monument in 1935 and a national monument in 1965, and took its present name in 1990 when the battlefield and the ranch were added.