Petroglyph National Monument

The West Mesa runs along Albuquerque's western edge as a dark escarpment of broken basalt, the front of lava that flowed from a line of small volcanoes whose five cones still stand on the skyline behind it. Where the rock had weathered dark, people pecked through the surface to the paler stone beneath. The monument holds an estimated 24,000 images. Most were made by ancestral Pueblo people between about 1300 and 1650; some may be two or three thousand years older, and others, crosses and brands among them, were cut by Spanish settlers. The Pueblos regard the whole escarpment as sacred.

Its protection came from the city around it. In the mid-1980s a citizens' survey recorded more than 15,000 petroglyphs along the mesa's edge, and Congress created the monument on June 27, 1990, to be run jointly by the National Park Service and the city's Open Space Division. More than half the land is still city or state property.

The city kept growing west. In 1997 Congress took 8.5 acres out of the monument so that Paseo del Norte could be carried up the escarpment, over the objections of Pueblo governments and conservationists. The fight went on for a decade through the legislature, the courts and a 2003 bond vote the road's backers lost, and the extension opened in 2007.

The visitor center is on Unser Boulevard. Boca Negra Canyon, two miles north, has short, partly paved trails past dense panels; Rinconada Canyon, a mile south, is a walk of about two miles along the base of the escarpment; Piedras Marcadas lies farther north among houses. The volcanoes have their own trails on top of the mesa.