Jemez Springs Shines Bright

The state historic site now works to celebrate “resistance and resilience,” Gallegos says, and the resulting amalgamation of cultures. That balance appears in the annual Lights of Gisewa (often misspelled as Giusewa, she notes) event in two ways: by using the Hemish name for the place—a reference to its geothermal springs—and by adorning the remaining dwellings and the rebuilt kiva with farolitos that literally illuminate that history.

“We’re at a point in time where we can talk about these things openly and then show the richness that has been born out of resistance, the resilience of these communities, and the acceptance today to try to do better,” Gallegos says.

The farolito event also hosts dancers from Jemez and Acoma pueblos to infuse an Indigenous presence. Last year, Jemez Pueblo dancers led a friendship dance, drawing the audience into a serpentine shuffle that wove among two bonfires in the campo santo, the open ground in front of the church. Drummers and singers serenaded under a clear winter sky filled with piercing stars. “It was cold, but it was beautiful,” Gallegos recalls. “We were all just making this beautiful memory and community together.”

The continuity of human history is often uniquely visible in New Mexico. This feels particularly true at the Jemez Historic Site, where a kiva, a sacred structure for Pueblo people, stands next to a mission church, and the towers of a current house of worship are visible just across the street.

Communities are made and remade over the centuries, but some elements of their identity transfer through generations. Sanctified ground remains sanctified ground, if for a different religion. The Hemish tell a story of traveling through worlds and across the Southwest before they found this river valley with everything they needed to hunt, build, grow, and thrive. They settled where the village of Jemez Springs is now. And still, it’s a little village with just enough and a touch of a remaking underway, but with an effort to hold fast to a quirky, artistic feel.

DURING LIGHTS OF GISEWA, JEMEZ SPRINGS volunteers line the village plaza with farolitos to welcome visitors and light the way to the historic site. The tiny town of less than 200 swells to a few thousand during the event, which includes pop-up food trucks and art vendors.

The route passes the playground equipment and tennis courts at Father Fitzgerald Park, where an unassuming gazebo shelters a well. Water gurgles up from a pipe, sometimes as hot as 180 degrees, on its way to the Jemez Springs Bath House. Opened in the 1870s for travelers to submerge in healing waters, the historic property is now operated as a nonprofit by the village.

Faint black lettering on crumbling stucco still marks the old Hot Sulphur Spring Water Baths, where water was hand-cranked into steam rooms and baths. That well, now sheltered in a greenhouse next to gardens sprouting in late summer with rosemary, greens, and peppers, still feeds the pools at Jemez Hot Springs. “It’s nice to be adjacent to it, and kind of share the history,” says Carrie Dennis, who works the Jemez Hot Springs front desk.

The four geothermal pools at the retreat started with a backhoe opening the earth next to the Jemez River (only once did spring runoff wash the rock-lined pool away) and have since been solidified in cement. The mineral-rich water has left deposits over the years, layering sediments on the cement-lined tubs as a soft surface underfoot. Where trickles spill into the pools from tiny springs in what passes for temperature control, the minerals deposit themselves in cream and caramel swirls. Soakers at the hot springs absorb that calcium, magnesium, lithium, and potassium, and with them, many believe, come health benefits.

From the turquoise pools, the river rushes by unseen and the layer-caked canyon walls loom. Cobalt storm clouds gathering over the Jemez Mountains raise no worries. A hot spring can bring a certain feeling of imperviousness. Soak while a storm swirls by or snowflakes drop, melting on warm skin, and the laws of thermodynamics begin to feel like they no longer apply.

A single investor now owns the Jemez Hot Springs along with three cabins for overnight guests (no TV or radio are allowed—use the quiet for a full mental reset). They also own the nearby boho-chic and budget-friendly Laughing Lizard Inn, which has recently been renovated, and the semiprivate retreat of Cañon del Rio a half mile down the road. That same investor has also bought and renovated two commercial spaces, the former Stage Stop and the Laughing Lizard Cafe, with hopes to see new businesses start up there.

“ ‘Coming soon’ is all I’m allowed to say,” says Liz Shulman, who manages the lodging properties. She’s working that afternoon at Cañon del Rio, where seven guest rooms spread into wings fanning out around a courtyard and pond where goldfish flit between the lily pads.

The National Park Service management of Valles Caldera National Preserve, about 17 miles to the north, has brought more people to the area, including Jemez Springs. But Shulman is also noticing an influx of staycationers from Albuquerque and Santa Fe, both a little over an hour’s drive away. “It’s slowly getting discovered,” she says of the town itself. “We’re trying to keep it quaint and cute.”

Hiking trails web through the Valles Caldera, some mellow enough for snowshoeing and cross-country skiing through ponderosa pine forest or across the snowy basin of Valle Grande. Curious road-trippers stop at the Yellowstone-esque Soda Dam upriver from town, where a mushroom cap of mineralization nearly blocks the river, water plunging out from under its 50-foot-tall dome. Adventurous types can brave slick footing to scramble along the 300-foot-long dam and look down on the glistening dome covered in a seeping gold stain of water.

There’s definitely more traffic in town, says Theodore Greer, a photographer who has lived in Jemez Springs for 35 years. Some places weren’t prepared for the additional people. But there’s a general sense of hope, too, that locals will also soon enjoy a grocery store and more places to eat. Greer remembers when the Stage Stop ran a general store with gas pumps, canned goods, picnic supplies, and ice cream cones. Now the renovated space is awaiting a new tenant.

But the changes, slow as they may be, have also been good. For him, that happened 15 years ago, with a small but significant shift for the area’s artists when the Jemez Fine Art Gallery and the Jemez Artisans Co-op Gallery & Shop opened. He and his wife are two of seven members who share in staffing the co-op gallery while nudging one another to keep the shelves stocked.

“There have always been a lot of artists, craftspeople, and musicians all around the area, but more or less just in their own little orbits,” Greer says. “The galleries brought people together and kind of changed the feeling of the place.”

Now the galleries are a go-to social space, a support network, and a source of income (if only to cover the supplies to make more artwork). For Greer, making more art often draws him out into the Jemez Mountains, which continue to reveal marvels.

“Every time you turn around, there’s a different rock formation, a different era of so many hundreds of millions of years,” he says. “Then the erosion that happens creates a force that sculpts the landscape in surprising ways. You go around every corner, and it’s likely to be a different experience.”

SOUTH ON NM 4, the landscape transforms again, but the history echoes. Bulbous, brick-red walls greet hikers on Red Rocks Trail. As the path bends around the first sandstone prow, the view opens to a canyon stacked with towers and embellished with fins, all in the burnished red the trail name promises. The packed-earth route loops for just over a mile through that canyon, passing alcoves, towers, and black varnish streaks.

“Go all the way back in the slot canyon, as far as the rockfall,” Alex Toledo tells me before I head out for the hike from the Walatowa Visitor Center, in Jemez Pueblo. So I turn onto a side trail and head into a deeply shaded canyon. The walls narrow to just wider than an arm-span, closing in the view of a cloudless blue sky overhead.

Toledo often guides hiking tours but is busy on the morning I visit. He’s overseeing the visitor center café and, as part of the marketing team, helping with a commercial filming about visiting the pueblo and the relatively new trail. A drone buzzes through the courtyard and gift shop, filming as we talk later about the history he unspools for visitors on tours.

The Hemish came south from Colorado and east from Chaco Canyon to settle in the southern flanks of the Jemez Mountains a thousand years ago, building villages and as many as a dozen major pueblos for as many as 30,000 people. They made the still-famous Jemez black-on-white pottery, centuries-old examples of which the visitor center museum displays. The result of the tumult shared at the Jemez Historic Site—the conquest, the violence, the cultural suppression and erasure, the revolt—has been that the Hemish, their numbers greatly diminished and still just around 3,400 enrolled tribal members, had to find a way to coexist with the small town and its tourists.

“We’re basically living in two worlds,” Toledo says.

When people come to Walatowa, the village where Jemez ancestors consolidated at the end of the 1600s, Toledo uses his time on the trail with them to share this history: “just giving them some knowledge of where they are, what land they’re occupying.”

The question he answers most often speaks to that complicated history. People often ask, “Is it pronounced, ‘Jay-mez?’ ” He explains how the H sound of the Hemish name translated for Spanish colonists. But now, as the local cultures continue to evolve and blend and outsiders of a very different kind come to town, the J confuses English speakers. Again, the place and its people try to find a way to balance complicated influences and use history to help understand the present.

Read more: Hit some of the state’s classic scenic drives.