Just 35 miles south of Santa Fe, located on the Pajarito Plateau, is the Kasha–Katuwe Tent Rocks National Monument.

                It’s a remarkable place, and a great hike.

See that “hoodoo” with a caprock way up there?

Here’s a close-up with my lens zoomed as far as it will go. Man, I love this camera!

“Hoodoo” is a generic term used to

denote a pinnacle or column of

weathered rock. I wouldn’t kid you;

look it up.

Look, here are some more.

Here’s how you get a caprock. (Oh brother, here comes the science!) Imagine big time volcanic eruptions that go

on for centuries. These leave behind layers of pumice, ash, and tuff and eventually are a thousand feet thick. Now,

here and there the volcanoes also spew out some big old rocks made from much harder material than the ash, tuff,

and pumice. Then give water and wind erosion several millions of years to wear away the softer stuff, while the

hard rocks act to protect the material directly underneath them, and what you get are hoodoos with caprocks. 

See, that didn’t take too long.

Now, briefly return to the first picture

and look in the middle section.

The picture below is a blow-up of that

section ... voilà: Tent Rocks!

...obviously named because of  their

resemblance to the indian tepees.

Throughout the park, some of

the “tents” have lost their hard,

resistant caprocks and are

disintegrating. While fairly

uniform in their conical shape,

the tent rock formations here

vary in height from just a few

feet, to 90 feet.

Before we got into the Tent Rocks Monument proper, we came upon this marker.

And I was lucky enough to be watching a recent broadcast of the PBS show,

“Antiques Roadshow” where one of those Storyteller pots was displayed: