La Bajada

How do you know a book is fraudulent?

When it purports to give a driver an explanation of all the important geological features visible from a car, and, in the section on I-25 from Albuquerque to Santa Fe, doesn’t mention La Bajada Hill.

The La Bajada escarpment rises some 800' from the Santo Domingo basin. The first road, built by the army in the 1860's, had some 28% grades. When the last territorial governor, William Mills, had a better road built in 1910, it had 23 hairpin turns or switchbacks to make the mile and half climb with a maximum 7.8% grade. Railroads then couldn’t handle more than 3%.

Fraudulent may be too strong a term for a book that does provide some useful information, but La Bajada’s not something you can miss if you’re driving south from Santa Fe. You do wonder if the author ever made the drive.

The city was founded in 1610 by Pedro de Peralta as a safer, perhaps better watered, alternative to the Española valley. It was conceived as a citadel.

To get there from the river you had to scale the walls of White Rock Canyon. To get there from the north you had to climb what we now call Opera Hill from the Tesuque valley. To get there from the east you had to cross the Sangre de Cristo. To get there from the south you had to come up La Bajada from the Galisteo river.

The Atkinson, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad refused to come. It’s engineers skirted the Sangre de Cristo to find an opening to the south. To pacify the local politicians they built a station at Lamy and left it to them to get their goods uphill.

Route 66 originally climbed the hill, but was the source of great complaint by Fred Harvey’s organization who wanted to give rail passengers local tours on buses. When governor Arthur Thomas Hannett suggested rerouting the road from Santa Rosa to Albuquerque, merchants in Santa Fe protested. He was not re-elected in 1927. In the remaining month of his term the former member of the State Highway Commission had the Santa Rosa cutoff built anyway.

The present La Bajada road was built in 1932 three miles east of the original, and later improved for the interstate system. The old road still exists for fans of Route 66. However, it’s not maintained and requires a different vehicle than mine.

The modern road is still a thrill to drive, at least coming down. You want to look out over the opening vistas of red stone but need to keep the car from accelerating too quickly while others are passing you at much greater speeds.

Going up there’s a third lane and the sheer incline modulates people’s speed. However, because you’re rising through wooded land the ascent seems darker and less exciting than the descent.

Going down, you can’t pull off until you’re at the bottom at the exit to Cochiti Pueblo, which is where these pictures were taken Saturday. They don’t capture the vertigo, but they suggest why I can always tolerate driving to Albuquerque.

Note: For more on the La Bajada road, see David J. Krammer, “Historic and Architectural Resources of Route 66 through New Mexico,” prepared for the National Register of Historic Places in 1993.