Cerrillos Hills State Park

Fellow parks enthusiasts, thank you for your support and encouragement as my state park quest unfolds. I want to let you know I won’t be posting here for a few months. I’ll be out on the road, but I’ll be back. Stay tuned for updates, and keep in touch. I hope you enjoy this post from a state park in New Mexico.

–Lauren

I couldn’t help myself. We started up the Jane Sanchez Calvin Trail in Cerrillos Hills State Park, and less than a quarter-mile in, I started taking pictures. I wasn’t planning to post about the park — I have plenty of Washington state parks to write about, after all — but I was captivated by the desert landscape and the area’s mining history, interpreted throughout the park.

After I stopped for the fourth time to frame a picture, Mr. Adventure asked, “Are you writing about this?” Well… Apparently yes. I’d wanted to visit Cerrillos Hills for a couple of years, and we’d headed to the park shortly after arriving in New Mexico. Its location about 35 minutes south of Santa Fe made it ideal for a day trip.

We’d stopped first at the volunteer-run visitor center, where a friendly local gave us tips for a five-mile loop that offered an overview of the park. “You’ll come back again,” he predicted. “There’s something about this landscape.”

A thousand years of mining

The trail was quiet, a stark contrast to what this area would have looked like in the late 1800s when more than 2000 mining claims freckled the hills. About 10of those mines are interpreted in the park, and we soon came to one alongside the trail. A platform provided safe viewing into the securely covered 22 foot-deep shaft. Many of the mine sites date to the late 1870s, when silver and lead mining boomed in the Cerrillos Hills, fueled by prospectors escaping labor unrest in Leadville, Colorado, and the arrival of the railroad through Cerrillos in 1880.

But ancient peoples valued these hills for their minerals a thousand years before the 1879 boom. Archaeologists have found evidence of turquoise mining by 900 AD, and by 1300 BCE ancestral peoples were mining lead galena for use in glazing Rio Grande pottery. Indeed, Cerrillos Hills may be the site of the oldest mine in the United States. Cerrillos Hills turquoise has been found at Chaco Canyon, 110 miles to the northwest, undoubtedly arriving there through trade. 

Spanish conquistadores passed through the area in the mid-1500s but were more interested in gold than turquoise. The hills got their name in the 1600s, when a Spanish cattle rancher dubbed them Los Cerrillos, which means “little hills.” So the park name translates as Little Hills Hills State Park. I’m slowly learning Spanish and was tickled by this redundancy.

In the 1890s, the iconic New York jeweler Tiffany & Co. used turquoise from Cerrillos Hills mines to craft jewelry, creating a market for the stone. The history seems murky on this point, but it’s possible the semi-precious stone’s distinctive blue-green color inspired the company’s instantly recognizable blue box. Tiffany’s use of turquoise marked a high point in the stone’s popularity, which faded until the 1970s when interest in Southwestern and Indian jewelry reignited. Santa Fe jeweler Doug Magnus owns the Tiffany Mine today; a virtual tour gives an idea of its size. 

Most mines had closed by the early 1900s, although a few continued to extract lead, zinc, manganese, silver, and turquoise through World War I. Industrial mining was pretty much finished by the early 1900s, and today mining in the Cerrillos Hills is mostly at the hobbyist level.

On the trail

We hiked past several more mine sites, each marked with the prospector, active years, and some background. Most miners stayed until their luck or money ran out, then moved on to the next prospect. 

Crossing the park road near a small spring, we walked the Escalante Trail to its junction with the Elkins Canyon Trail, which we would follow the rest of the way. Piñon and juniper grow on the hills, mixed with cholla cactus, yucca, and other plants. On this gray April day much of the flora was still dormant, though here and there a few spring blossoms and buds added sparks of color.

We walked down the slopes into a narrow canyon, emerging just outside the park boundary on a local road. A dusty quarter-mile later and we were back in the park, hiking a short trail to the parking area and our car.

A young park 

Cerrillos Hills is barely out of adolescence, in park years. In the late 1990s, locals saw the area’s scenic and historical potential and led the successful drive in 1998 for a bond issue to raise funds for purchasing private land for public use. By early 2000, Santa Fe County purchased 1,116 acres for open space. Working with the all-volunteer Cerrillos Hills Park Coalition, the county added signs, trails, and restrooms over the next few years. In 2003, former Interior Secretary Stewart Udall, then a Santa Fe resident, gave the keynote address at the park’s official dedication. The New Mexico legislature in 2006 directed the New Mexico State Parks Division to conduct a feasibility study to determine whether Cerrillos Hills met the criteria to become a state park. It did, and in 2009, NMSPD and Santa Fe County entered into an agreement for the state to manage the new state park. With Amigos de Cerrillos Hills on board as the official volunteer partner, the visitor center opened in 2012.

Just south of the park, the tiny, historic village of Cerrillos has a pretty church, a highly rated restaurant and saloon, and the fascinating Casa Grande Trading Post, Petting Zoo, and Cerrillos Turquoise Mining Museum. This quirky gem features the owners’ turquoise from their Cerrillos mine as well as turquoise from around the world. The color and pattern variations are fascinating. Mr. Adventure enjoyed feeding the personable goats and llama, none of which even glanced at him until he came out of the museum holding a paper bag of feed. 

The park is a treasure, easily reachable from Santa Fe and right on the Turquoise Trail, a scenic byway that meanders the mountainous mining region between the state capital and Albuquerque. Artists’ studios and galleries dot the road and its sprinkling of settlements, proving that the money these days is more in tourism than turquoise. The visitor center volunteer was right: there is something about the Cerrillos Hills State Park landscape. And we’ll definitely be back.