Biohazard and Crime Scene Remediation in Cañones, NM

Cañones is a census-designated place (CDP) in Rio Arriba County, New Mexico, one of the county's historic Hispano land-grant villages.

The 2020 census counted 85 residents in Cañones.

The CDP covers 4.14 square miles at an elevation of about 7,356 feet.

The community's origins trace to 1766, when Juan Pablo Martín Serrano was awarded the Polvadera Grant and established a seasonal rancho in the canyon, raising livestock and trading with the Utes.

Permanent settlement at the present site began in 1807, when Juan Bautista Valdez bought land from the grant.

Just south of Cañones, on Pueblo Mesa, stands the Tewa ruin of Tsee P'in Ówîngeh Kayyee, also called Tsiping, an ancestral pueblo occupied during the Classic period, between about 1200 and 1325 CE.

At its peak the Tsiping settlement had between 335 and 400 ground-floor rooms and sixteen kivas arranged around a central plaza; a trailhead at the south end of County Road 196 leads to the ruins.

Anthropologists Paul Kutsche and John R. Van Ness lived in Cañones in the 1960s and wrote a book portraying it as a typical village of the Rio Arriba subculture of Hispanic New Mexico, marked by communal land grants and strong community spirit.

In the 1960s the state closed Cañones' one-room school and ordered its children bused to Coyote; the parents refused en masse, were fined for truancy, and the fight ended with the community getting an acceptable paved road.

Cañones had its own post office until it closed on January 3, 2002; the community retains ZIP code 87516.