Trip out West - Mesa Verde in Colorado

Day 6; Wednesday, July 4th
Driving to Mesa Verde and setting up camp there

We started our Independence Day by buying some ice to help keep our perishables cold (baby carrots, bread, trail mix with chocolate as well as the water jugs) and then made our way to Mesa Verde – which is in the southern part of Colorado.  After driving nearly the whole length of New Mexico the day before, I had somehow thought the trek to Colorado would be a cake-walk.  As it were, it was still a long haul of several hours; but we did drive through some amazing country!

The scenery was always changing from stunning painted hills, to white-faced cliffs; from barren scrub to pine-covered hills that were reminiscent of back home.

It seems that every mile there was a picture that needed taking and neither of us had any qualms with pulling off the road to snap a few shots.

Soon after entering Colorado, we stopped off at a visitor center to get the lay of the land and to get more local info on Mesa Verde.  The ladies were very helpful and informative, providing us with maps and directions on how to get to the camp ground in the park.

We took our time at this stop to walk around a little as the visitor center was right on a river that was teaming with swimmers and people canoeing, rafting, tubing and kayaking.  Plus the scenery was absolutely amazing, a beautiful taste of what we would see at the Mesa.

After the visitor center it was just a sort drive to the entrance of Mesa Verde.  We paid our admission fee, then our camping fee and then paid for a couple tours for the next day.  There were many people at the camp-sites but they were all friendly and it wasn’t too noisy. 

This was our first opportunity to tent-camp on the trip and it was a good evening for it.  After pitching the tent and eating a light dinner, we spent the remainder of the evening walking around the camp-grounds and unwinding from our long day.

To be awoken at dawn to the sound of birds singing in the morning is both charming and annoying – birds wake up long before tired campers.  Still, it helped us get an early start; we were up before 7:30.  We took no time to break camp and start our day.  The park offers a pancake breakfast for campers and we were happy to partake in a hot meal. (Knowing that we would never be too far from hot food, we didn’t bring any cooking apparatuses with us on this trip.)

After that we made the hour or so drive down to our first tour of the day – an elaborate cliff dwelling called “Cliff Palace House”.  You see, Mesa Verde was once the home of a group of Native Americans called the Anasazi (now called the “Ancestral Puebloans”).  To maximize the fertile – if somewhat limited – farmland available to them – and perhaps to provide protection from marauders – they built their homes along the openings in the steep cliff faces in the area.  These amazing stone structures have stood for over 700 years!  The Parks Service offers guided tours of these marvels in ingenuity.  Cliff Palace House is by far the largest and most elaborate of the known cliff dwellings – housing many families and sporting several subterranean structures called “kivas”: round pits, often twelve or so feet deep, that had been capped with logs, grasses and plaster.  A hole in the top (over the fire pit) with a ladder going down provided the only entrance to these structures that are believed to have been used for religious purposes; however there’s evidence that they were used for mundane activities as well – like weaving and flour-grinding.  Most kivas now are without their roofs and you can look in at the shallow fire pits and see the ingeniousness of the air vents that had been used to circulate air in the pits and keep the fire from flaring to high or snuffing out completely.

At one of our stops, you could go done into an “intact” kiva.  A neat idea.  There was a roof and a ladder going down, but the fire pit and smaller pit called a “sipapu” had been filled in and the air vent was partially collapsed.  Not a “genuine” kiva in my opinion.

Our other tour was another structure called “Balcony House”.  Where Cliff Palace was easy to get to with stairs and groomed paths – Balcony House is only accessed by a series of ladders.  It was very fun :)

It’s always intriguing trying to guess the intents of ancient peoples and how they lived and why they went away (they “disappeared” long before Europeans came to the area), but there’s just not enough evidence to answer a lot of those question.

We had fun, none-the-less.  We hiked some of the self-guided paths and checked out some very neat petroglyphs (cliff drawings).  Finally it was time to leave and we drove our way back up through the park – taking some farewell pictures as we went.

We stopped for a quick photo op at the Four Corners (where Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona and Utah meet), before continuing on our way.  We happened to arrive in the middle of a dust storm.  It made navigating outside of the car unpleasant, but it wasn’t too bad.

Dinner that evening was at a small diner in an equally small town called Mexican Water.  We had driven out of the storm by then, but it had caught back up with us as we ate, so we got to watch it from the safety of the diner.

We got lucky in our timing and were able to drive through Monument Valley in North-Eastern Arizona as the sun was setting.  The weather had cleared again and we got some breath-taking pictures!!