Visiting the Puye Cliff Dwellings off of Highway 30, just west of Española and northwest of Santa Fe requires a $20 to $25 guided tour by a Santa Clara Puebloan. You can make reservations online or you can just show up and wait for the next open tour. There are four tours depending on availability. When my wife and I went in July of 2023, there was only one, the Puye Cliff Dwellings Mesa Top Tour (one hour). There’s also the Puye Cliff Dwellings Adventure Tour (two hours), the Puye Cliff Dwellings Tour (one hour), and the Roadrunner Trail (30 minutes). The Roadrunner’s actually $20.

• The 2 hour Puye Cliff Dwellings Adventure Tour is the biggest picture and lets the visitor see the Puye Village, Mesa Top, and the Cliffside.

• The 1 hour Mesa Top Tour lets you see the Puye Cliff Dwellings Mesa Top village with the kiva, the reconstructed section of the pueblo, and the spectacular views. You also have the option of going down the cliffs and seeing the cavates that were carved into the volcanic tuff.

• The 1 hour Dwellings Tour lets you see the cliffside Cavates.

• The 30 minute Roadrunner Trail lets a visitor also see the Cavates.

  My wife and I really enjoyed the tour although if you have not been to Bandelier National Monument or Tsankawi, I would head to those places first. They are unguided and offer more freedom. Also, they’re not timed. The guide was knowledgeable on many things and the tour was interesting and fun and the views were phenomenal. Truly gorgeous views of the Rio Grande Valley and the Sangre De Christo Mountains across Española.

Around 900 AD, the area that would become the Puye Cliff Dwellings were first inhabited by the early Puebloans. There had been Ancient Ones before them; Mammoth Eaters, Sloth Hunters, Sabertooth Tiger Survivors, but not until the pit house builders were there villages. But the ones who built Puye were most likely not the sole descendants of these first peoples. The newcomers in the 900s were probably early Mesa Verdeans who resented the Chacoan Anasazi’s rise to the west and fled the San Juan River for the Rio Grande and its tributaries. Eventually though, during the 14th century, 14,000 new migrants from the Mesa Verde Region of the Four Corners would settle in the Rio Grande Valley. Many of them, would land here, at the Puye Cliff Dwellings. Today, the people of the Santa Clara Pueblo claim these ruins as their ancestral homelands. For more on this story, check out my podcast episode over the migration in the American Southwest after the Anasazi Civil War: The Ancient Ones: Pueblos, Plazas, & The Rise of The Kachinas.

The Visitor Center is also a storied place. The 1930s Harvey House was built by the Fred Harvey Company in a sort of Pueblo Revival style that was popular in that time. It was a restaurant and small hotel that took people to the site long ago during the early years of vacationing to the area. In Winslow, Arizona, there is another Harvey House; the beautifully built and still going La Posada Hotel and Gardens. I had an absolutely delicious dinner of Bison Short Ribs and a fantastic drink to accompany it at La Posada. Today, the Harvey House at Puye is the gift shop as well as a small museum with facts and some artifacts.