2 Best Sights in Northwestern New Mexico, New Mexico

When you see the imposing 200-foot-high sandstone bluff that served as a rest stop for Indians, explorers, soldiers, and pioneers, you can understand how El Morro ("the Headland") got its name. The bluff is the famous Inscription Rock, where wayfarers stopped to partake of a waterhole at its base and left behind messages, signatures, and petroglyphs carved into the soft sandstone. The paved Inscription Trail makes a quick ½-mi round-trip from the visitor center and passes that historic water source and numerous inscriptions. Although El Morro is justly renowned for Inscription Rock, try to allow an extra 90 minutes or so to venture along the spectacular, moderately strenuous 2-mi (round-trip) Headland Trail, which meanders past the excavated edge of an extensive field of late-13th-century pueblo ruins, cuts along the precarious rim of a deep box canyon, and affords panoramic views across the Zuni Mountains and El Malpais. The monument's compact museum chronicles 700 years of human history in this region.

Despite its unabashed commercialism (announced by its many somewhat-over-the-top, retro-style billboard advertisements), this roadside curiosity, set squarely on the Continental Divide, easily merits an hour of your time—the short trail from the 1930s trading post (now the gift shop) just off NM 53 affords unusual vistas of blackened lava fields and gnarled juniper and ponderosa stands. It's about a 20-minute moderately strenuous jaunt up to the 1,200-foot-diameter crater of Bandera Volcano, which last unleashed a torrent of lava 10,000 years ago. An even shorter walk leads to an old wooden staircase that descends 100 feet into the bowels of a collapsed lava tube, where the Ice Cave never rises above 31°F year-round and has a perpetual floor of blue-green ice. The ice remains year after year because of the combination of the air flow patterns in the lava tube and the insulating properties of the lava itself.