Mesa Verde National Park

Friday June 9, 2006

We slept in for a little bit and were off for Mesa Verde around 8:30 am from Montrose. Mesa Verde is outside Cortez, CO, in Southwest Colorado. It’s all back roads to get there, and they all go through the San Juan Mountains and Durango. The roads were extremely winding, going up, down, and around the mountain passes, most of the time going only about 25 MPH. It was really beautiful scenery, but when you get behind a semi truck going 10 MPH up the mountain for 7 miles, with no way to pass, it gets old real quick. At one point we were cruising along pretty well, going down a long downhill section when we come to a stop in front of a highway worker with one of those signs that have “SLOW” on one side and “STOP” on the other. The “STOP” side was showing to us. We pull up right in front of him, and he walks over. “The road is being paved down the mountain”, he says. “It’ll be about 20-25 minutes.” And since we were first in line, it was obvious that we JUST missed the line of cars they just let through. Anyway, it was really only about an 18 minute wait, and then we were on our way.

We drove into Mesa Verde and stopped at the campground to get a spot. We were planning on calling Travis after we found a spot, but when we stopped at the camp store to find a site, there’s Travis’s trusty Saturn sitting in the parking lot. Travis and his friend Lisa had just showed up themselves, and were going to start looking for us. We grabbed a campsite and then headed down to the Visitor Center to get tickets for the guided ranger hikes. Mesa Verde is more of a cultural park than a hiking/scenery/wildlife park, as it houses the remains of over 600 Ancient Pueblo cliff dwellings. Most of the best preserved sites can only be accessed by guided ranger tours so that the idiot tourists don’t ruin all the ruins. (I know -- ironic isn’t it?) We got tickets for an afternoon hike to Balcony House, and then tickets for the next morning for Cliff Palace. We drove down to Balcony House and hooked up with our tour. The ranger was pretty informative, about the reasons why the Ancestral Puebloans lived on cliffs and the purpose behind the kivas and rooms in each ruin. We had to climb a 32 foot ladder to reach the ruins, which wasn’t too difficult but I guess some people have trouble with the heights. After about an hour tour of the ruins, we had to crawl through a really narrow tunnel and then climb a steep cliff to get out. After that we took another hike to the only open ruin in the park where rangers are not needed to explore the ruins, Spruce Tree House.

We headed back to our campsite at about 5:00 pm for dinner, along with about 2,500 of our favorite red ant friends who loved to crawl up and bite our ankles. Dinner was a pain, and the stupid campground didn’t have a camp sink to clean dishes (but they made sure to say not to wash them at the camp site, and not to wash them in the bathroom sinks). Travis and Lisa stopped by and we hung out for a bit. They had a campsite in the national forest about 20 miles away, so they took off around sunset. We read a bit at the camp and watched the moon rise over the cliffs and the stars come out. It was really hot during the day, but once the sun went down it got downright chilly, and we needed long pants and sweatshirts. We headed to bed around 10:00 pm.