Situated in a direct line not over twenty miles west of Santa Fe, it can still be reached only after a long day's tedious travel.

It is a narrow valley, nowhere broader than half a mile; and from where it begins in the west to where it closes in a dark and gloomy entrance, scarcely wide enough for two men to pass abreast, in the east, its length does not exceed six miles.

Its southern rim is formed by the slope of a timbered mesa, and that slope is partly overgrown by shrubbery.

The northern border constitutes a line of vertical cliffs of yellowish and white pumice, projecting and re-entering like decorations of a stage,--now perpendicular and smooth for some distance, now sweeping back in the shape of an arched segment.
These cliffs vary in height, although nowhere are they less than two hundred feet.

Their tops rise in huge pillars, in crags and pinnacles.
Brushwood and pine timber crown the mesa of which these fantastic projections are but the shaggy border.
Through the vale itself rustles the clear and cool brook to which the name of Rito de los Frijoles is applied.