Editor's note: The following story was written as part of a series called "Cheap Thrills" for the Albuquerque Journal. The criteria for these "thrills" are 1) a day-trippable circle roughly 150 miles from Albuquerque and 2) fees of no more than $10. Enjoy.
Take more than a few steps into the mouth of Sandia Cave and you'll be swallowed by darkness.
If you forget to carry a flashlight, your exploration of the ancient lair of Sandia Man will end not much farther than a breadcrumb's toss from the entrance.
But that's far enough to achieve a cave-dweller's sense of hole-in-the-wall shelter.
Sandia Cave
Location: In Las Huertas Canyon, about four miles above Placitas along SR 156. Hours: Open during daylight hours. Cost: Free Features: Cave contains skeletal remains and other artifacts from the Ice Age.
The wall, in this case, is a limestone cliff in Las Huertas Canyon, about four miles above Placitas along SR 156 (with three of those miles being gravel road through Cibola National Forest).
As you go up this route toward the backside of Sandia Crest, look for a narrow vertical sign that says "Sandia Cave," which marks the parking area at the beginning of a half-mile trail to the cave.
Although the trail is an easy hike, the cave isn't exactly wheelchair accessible -- there's a concrete staircase to scale and then a 12-foot spiral of metal steps up the sheer face of the cliff.
Sandia Cave, discovered by an anthropology graduate student in 1936, was excavated by University of New Mexico archeological teams between 1937 and 1941. It contained skeletal remains of such Ice Age beasts as the wooly mammoth and mastodon and giant sloth, as well as stone lance and arrow points, basket scraps and remnants of woven yucca moccasins.
The diggers found no human bones in the cave debris.
At first, it was thought that Sandia Man may have used the cave as a seasonal retreat about 22,000 years ago. But more recent dating shows that Sandia Man actually lived periodically in the cave only 10,000 to 12,000 years ago.
Even that revised age-estimate would make Sandia Man one of the first recorded inhabitants of North America, hunting game in the Sandias during the same era as Folsom Man roamed the plains of Northeastern New Mexico. (There's no evidence these two guys ever met each other.)
You're facing down valley as you walk along the trail from the parking area to the cave. You move along the cliff wall toward a widening vista of the immensely broader Rio Grande Valley.
At a bend in the trail giving you a view of the path ahead, you notice two dark holes gaping near the top of the wall. One seems impossible to reach unless you can rock-climb up to it or rappel down from the top. But the other, the Sandia Cave, has that spiral staircase rising to a metal platform at its mouth.
You step into the cave and peer out from its shelter. From this vantage, the vast Rio Grande view is no longer visible. Instead, you're looking up valley at forest-covered slopes of the Sandias.
A few more steps into the cavern and you encounter a curtain of rock that hangs down to below waist level from the roof of the cave.
You squat to get beneath it, and discover that the cave curves to the left and is partially blocked again by a waist-high ridge of stone. Beyond this partial obstruction, the cave floor drops away, but it's impossible for you to see the far wall -- which might be many feet away, or just beyond the reach of your outstretched arm.
Without a flashlight, there is absolutely no way you're going to want to push on. You might strike a match or flick a lighter in an attempt to see how far the cave goes -- but neither method will be sufficient to show you what lies beyond what seems to be utter darkness.
Although fires are illegal, you might try to burn a piece of paper to see into the cave. But that doesn't work either. You'll note, however that the flame gutters out -- indicating, because there is no draft, that the cave has no other openings.
If you have a camera with a flash attachment, you might try to use it -- but each stroboscopic flash merely blinds you, come and gone too quick to give you any useful visual information.
Later, when the film is developed, you discover that a narrow tunnel slopes downward from this dark chamber's far wall. The far wall, you also discover, is only about six feet beyond the ridge over which you've aimed the camera.
In post-exploration reading, you learn that Sandia Cave continues for about 300 feet beyond the point where you stopped. You also learn that it's a tight, dusty crawl to the end of the cave.
You'd have needed not merely a flashlight, but also clothing suitable for getting dirty.
You don't regret turning prematurely back toward daylight.
Sandia Man, if he had any sense at all, wouldn't have gone much farther before sitting down to ponder his immediate, long-ago future.
Take more than a few steps into the mouth of Sandia Cave and you'll be swallowed by darkness.
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