Pecos National Historical Park

National Historical Park; The Ruins Of Pecos Pueblo And Two Spanish Mission Churches, Plus The Glorieta Pass Civil War Battlefield And The Forked Lightning Ranch · Pecos, New Mexico

Pecos Pueblo stood on a ridge between the plains and the mountains and grew rich on exactly that position, trading buffalo hides and meat from the Plains tribes for corn and cotton from the Rio Grande pueblos. At its height around 1450 it held perhaps two thousand people in a five-storey block. The Spanish arrived, and in 1625 built a mission church so large its foundations still read as a cathedral; the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 destroyed it and a smaller church went up on the ruins in 1717. Disease and raiding emptied the place, and in 1838 the last seventeen residents walked to Jemez Pueblo, where their descendants live. Three centuries later the same ridge saw the Battle of Glorieta Pass, the engagement that ended the Confederate campaign for the Southwest. The park holds all of it plus a 1920s ranch that belonged to Greer Garson, and the main loop takes a little over an hour. There is no entrance fee, which almost nobody expects of a national park unit half an hour from Santa Fe.

1 Peach Drive, Pecos, Pecos, New Mexico, 87552, United States

The visitor center and the Ancestral Sites trail are open daily in daylight hours year round, closing on a few federal holidays, with shorter hours in winter. The Glorieta Pass battlefield unit and the Forked Lightning Ranch house are open on a more limited basis, some of it by guided tour or by arrangement only. Access to the Pecos River sections for fishing is seasonal and permit-based. Snow occasionally closes the trail in winter.

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