The Last Words of Elephant Rock

With a project like this, there’s no avoiding Route 66. It changed Albuquerque like it changed many cities: first at its inception, with the crush of new motorists enchanted with the idea of a newly opened West; then with its decline and abandonment, the suddenly quiet streets a hollow reminder of what had been. There was an undeniable magic in the way 66 brought people to cities: it showcased each of the towns on its path, celebrated them, almost fetishized the idea of travel more than destination, and the towns along it prospered. Now, a cross-country traveler follows the interstate, a river of asphalt that traverses the nation, not celebrating the towns along the way, but bypassing them. Destination takes prominence over travel, and the route of the Mother Road is littered with relics of a past glory.

Elephant Rock was a relic of the Mother Road that predated US 66 by untold years, but failed to survive it. At the bottom of Tijeras Canyon, an accident of erosion deposited one boulder precariously on top of another, and for the thousands of years of human history in New Mexico the striking formation stood sentinel over the only entrance to the Rio Grande valley through the East Mountains. When the Spanish came, it became a boundary marker along the horse track between the town of Carnuel, founded to defend against the raiding Apaches of the Canyon, and the nascent Villa de Alburquerque.

When the city of Albuquerque’s population swelled from Easterners seeking the healing air of the Southwest, the horse track changed to a road and Elephant Rock served as a sign for those who arrived by motorcar that their long journey to “Well Country” was nearly at an end. Its prominent location and striking shape made it a natural backdrop for photographs, and indeed, there are many early photos with smiling tourists perched upon its base, or even high atop its crown.


In the 1930s, US 66 extended through the Canyon, and commerce came in its wake, as well as the tourist hunger for the exotic. Elephant Rock soon began making appearances on hand tinted post-cards sent to relatives in the East, another example of the strangeness of the Southwest. Its high visibility made it a natural billboard, and local businesses decorated it with appeals for visitors to rest at their motels and campsites.

And then, the interstate came. In a very real way, I-40 killed Elephant Rock, murdered it, in fact, needlessly and in cold blood. In the late 60s, destination was the new rule and interstate highways webbed their way across the country. I-40 stitched itself to the former U.S. 66 for the most part, except where 66 had gone through a town’s heart, I-40 either bypassed the town entirely, or fortified itself against it with overpasses and walled channels. In Albuquerque, the plan was for I-40 to traverse the same route as 66, demolishing the motels and other attractions along the way in favor of expediency. This provoked an outcry, and the route was shifted several miles north to its present location, but not before an overzealous road crew brought the well-out-of-the-way Elephant Rock’s long career as canyon sentinel to an end. With dynamite and two bulldozers they toppled the crown from the base, and that was that: the landmark was gone. Today, motorists pass the site and give no second glance to the low, unremarkable granite base or its once-upon-a-time crown lying forgotten in the gully a few yards away.

I visited it recently. It’s even easy to find if you know where to look: just to the right of Central avenue past the Town and Country Feed Store on the way out of Albuquerque. There’s a bare pull-off beside it, as if people still stop from time to time, maybe people like me, looking for something that’s gone.

A friend of mine and I took a few minutes to walk around its severed halves, clambor over the base, poke into the cracks in the granite surface, looking for… something. I guess I wanted some reminder of its former prominence, some indication that these two banal boulders that now only serve as protection for pack rats had meant something once, that they had been important to us, to Albuquerque. I looked for scorch marks on its surface to mark the dynamite that had toppled it, for some trace of paint to indicate the signage that had decorated it in its time as landmark, but there was nothing. Finally, I crawled into a small space beneath the lip of the crown and the sandy New Mexico earth. There were cholla cactus branches and garbage in that narrow hole, indication of the pack rat that now made it its home, but also something else. Barely visible in the shadowed space, there was an indication of paint, letters printed on the stone's uneven surface. I took a picture, crawled out, and came back to the car, satisfied.


So what are the last words of Elephant Rock? I don’t know, I couldn’t read them. They were obscured by the dim light, by the cholla laced pack rat nest, by the earth that the once-western-face of Elephant Rock had laid buried in for forty years. But what those words literally spell out doesn’t matter. Even if I could read them, their meaning would be lost in the banality of some decades old advertisement for a motel or autoparts store.

The meaning of those words has nothing to do with what they might say. They are instead proof of what once was, an indication of what that rock once meant, a connecting strand between the meaningful formation that stood as boundary between Albuquerque and the East, and a pair of unremarkable, anonymous boulders that sit clinging to a gully wall and lost in the weeds along a fading highway.


I owe a debt of thanks to Mike Smith for all his help, including providing the vintage photos above and the directions to find Elephant Rock. For more about Carnuel, Tijeras Canyon and the Sandia Mountains, check out his excellent book, Towns of the Sandia Mountains, which is where I first heard about this forgotten landmark.