Lower Falls at Bandelier National Monument on 12/15/24. A flash flood after the 2011 Las Conchas fire wiped out all the sediment used to build a trail to the bottom. No one has been able to find a safe way down on foot since then. You can very carefully stand off to the basalt side to see it from the top, or access outside the park and walk many many trail less miles to see it from the bottom.
Left photo is pre fire from the now wiped out switchbacks. Right photo is from a few years after the catastrophic flooding from a brave soul who bushwhacked along the Rio Grande. Note the house sized boulder at the top was washed away by the flood!
About 3/4 of the length of the canyon burned, followed immediately by heavy monsoon rain. There were multiple catastrophic floods with thousands of cubic feet of water per second in an area that normally flows at 0-3 cubic feet per second. In some places the fire burned so hot that the volcanic soil turned to glass. Some of the park’s picnic tables washed up dozens of miles down the Rio Grande in the Cochiti Reservoir.
Even 13 years later, a large flood happened this summer in this canyon that wiped out nearly all the footbridges and carved the canyon so deep near the upper falls that the pool at the base can no longer be access by foot. See the new ledge created in the left photo below. Compare to the right photo from spring 2024- all that vegetation got washed away
