New Mexico: Farmington – Kokopeli’s Cave

🌾 A God of Rather a Lot of Things

Kokopelli is, at his core, a fertility deity. He’s nearly always depicted as a humpbacked figure playing a flute, sometimes with feathers sticking out of his head, sometimes with what look like antennae, as though he’s picking up Radio Four from a great distance. He appears prominently in the traditions of several Western State Native American peoples, though what exactly he represents varies quite considerably depending on who you asked and when.

Among the Hopi — one of the Pueblo peoples of what is now Arizona, with a culture stretching back well over a thousand years — the mythology around Kokopelli was rather direct, not to say alarming. According to Hopi legend, that distinctive hump on his back wasn’t a deformity at all. It was a sack. And inside that sack, he carried babies, which he distributed to young women as he wandered from village to village. We can only assume the young women of the era had mixed feelings about this arrangement.

🌽 The Navajo Take a Different View

Over in Navajo tradition — the Navajo Nation being the largest Native American territory in the United States, covering a vast stretch of the Four Corners region across Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado — Kokopelli takes on a somewhat less startling role. Here he was regarded as a god of harvest and plenty, associated with the abundance of the land, the success of crops, and the general good fortune of the community.

This duality isn’t really surprising when you think about it. Fertility and harvest are two sides of the same very old coin — both are about abundance, renewal, and the continuation of life. Whether Kokopelli was delivering babies or ensuring the maize came in properly, the underlying theme was essentially the same: things growing, things continuing, things not going terribly wrong. Which, let’s be honest, is the hope of every civilisation that’s ever existed, including ours. We just don’t have a humpbacked flute player to thank for it.

🎵 Still Going Strong

Today, Kokopelli has crossed over entirely into mainstream American iconography. He appears on everything imaginable across the South-west — mugs, oven gloves, wind chimes, welcome mats — which one could argue either represents a touching continuity of cultural significance or the most thorough commercialisation of an ancient deity since someone put the Easter Bunny on a chocolate egg. Probably somewhere in between, if we’re being charitable.

Either way, if we spot him on our travels, we’ll know who he is now. Which is more than we could say before.

🗺️ Getting There — and the Minor Business of Finding the Cave

Getting to Farmington itself was simple enough. It’s a fairly unremarkable city of around 45,000 people sitting in the high desert of north-western New Mexico, built up through the 20th century on farming, ranching, and oil and gas. Not exactly the Amalfi Coast, but perfectly pleasant.

Finding the cave, on the other hand, required a little more effort. We had to arrange to meet the manager at their house in town first, and were then escorted out to the site. Quite civilised, really — though it did feel mildly as if we were being taken somewhere we’d never be found again.

🏜️ Built Into the Cliff — The Ojo Alamo Sandstone

The cave house is built directly into a sheer vertical cliff face of Tertiary Ojo Alamo sandstone — a geological formation laid down roughly 65 million years ago in the San Juan Basin. The cliff overlooks the La Plata River valley some 300 feet below, with the cave entrance sitting 70 feet beneath the surface above. So yes, you are very much inside a rock.

The entrance is reached by walking down a sloping path, with steps cut directly into the sandstone face. Once there, the views from both the cave and the clifftops were genuinely extraordinary — spectacular South-West sunsets rolling out across the La Plata River valley, and on a clear day, four states visible at once: Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado. This is the famous Four Corners, the only place in the United States where four state boundaries meet at a single point.

🧑‍💼 From Geologist’s Office to Bed and Breakfast

The cave isn’t ancient or natural — it’s entirely man-made. It was excavated at the behest of Bruce Black, the site’s owner and a consulting geologist — which goes some way to explaining why he looked at a solid cliff face and thought it would make a splendid office. Quite the vision. Sadly, the plan never materialised. Rather than leave a perfectly good hole in a rock sitting idle, they converted it into a bed and breakfast instead. Which is, when you think about it, a very sensible second choice.

🏠 Life Inside the Cave

The Cave itself is a surprisingly roomy affair — a solid 1,700 square feet, hewn directly into the face of a sandstone cliff, probably by people who had considerably more patience than I do. And despite what you might expect from somewhere that sounds like it ought to come with a resident mammoth, it is genuinely cosy. The underground setting keeps the temperature at a steady 68° to 73° Fahrenheit all year round, which is pleasant enough, although a few of our party — me, mainly — did find themselves reaching for a jumper in the evenings.

🛏️ What’s Actually Inside

The layout is far more civilised than the address might suggest. We had a master bedroom, a living area, a dining area, a full kitchen, and a bathroom that featured rock walls, a waterfall shower, and a Jacuzzi tub — all of which felt rather more luxurious than anything the original cliff-dwellers would have had access to. There are also two porches with sliding glass doors: one by the main entrance and one off the master bedroom, both of which were lovely for sitting and doing absolutely nothing productive.

The real centrepiece, though, is the large central sandstone pillar that anchors the whole space, naturally dividing the Cave into its various rooms. Around this pillar — with the exception of the bedroom and bathroom — all the living spaces arrange themselves rather neatly. It works surprisingly well.

🏺 The Kiva — A Genuine Highlight

There is also a replica Native American kiva, which is a genuinely lovely touch. The kiva is a traditional ceremonial chamber used by ancestral Puebloan peoples — circular, sunken, and steeped in thousands of years of Southwestern history going back to at least 700 AD. Whether Jack and Emily had any interest in the cultural heritage is another matter entirely. They went straight for the Jacuzzi, naturally, because de rigueur is de rigueur when you’re nine and eleven years old and there’s a bubbling tub involved. Any notions of romantic ambience quietly evaporated at that point, as they tend to do.

🌅 The Entryway — Small but Perfectly Formed

The entryway is on the compact side, but it earns its keep. Facing west, it turned out to be an ideal spot to watch the sun go down over the desert landscape — the kind of sunsets that make you feel briefly philosophical before you remember you haven’t sorted dinner yet. It was also, as we discovered fairly quickly, a prime location for encountering the local wildlife, who appeared to have absolutely no fear of humans whatsoever. None. They simply looked at us as though we were the ones who’d wandered into the wrong place, which, to be fair, was probably true.