Day 22 – Mesa Verde, Day 2

Miles traveled: 40
Hours on Road: hard to tell (we stopped for several tours)
States covered: 1 –Colorado

I think that Mesa Verde ranks as one of my favorite places along this trip. It isn’t even for the cliff dwellings, which are amazing. It’s the mesa itself. Whenever we drive off (for dinner one night, then to leave), I just can’t take my eyes off of it. Here’s this giant slab of rock/mountain in the middle of an otherwise flat plain. It’s completely flat on top and has tremendous drop-offs along its edges. You can see small green shrubs sparsely laid out along its sides with more dense greenery at the top. It’s an ominous presence even among the higher mountain peaks that can be seen in the distance. It now has several finger-like projections shooting off one side, but at one time it was one large mesa.

We had a great night’s sleep and were up by 7 a.m. I wrote on my computer while I drank some coffee. Jeff and Trey took a walk and heard that a campsite very near ours had had a black bear stroll through early that morning. We’d seen several deer, but no bear. They said they got it on video.

At around 9 a.m. we left for the dwellings, much farther along up the mesa. We were the first in line for the construction traffic, so we had about a 10-minute wait. The roads were once again all switchbacks along steep drop-offs, so the waiting did not bother me at all. It gave my heart a little time to recuperate.

We had to stop at the Visitors Center to buy tickets for the ranger-led tours we intended to go on. Tours leave every half hour, but by the time we reached the ticket counter at 10, the soonest we could go on a tour was noon, so the second tour would have to wait until 2 p.m. Unfortunately, the first tour was going to be the scarier one. Balcony House had a 32-foot ladder to enter the dwelling, a long walk along a three-foot wide path that had no wall against the 80-foot drop-off, a 60-foot climb along the open rock face (some of it on steps, the rest of it on two 10-foot ladders), and a couple of tunnels that are a relatively tight fit and where people are in front and in back of you. I had hoped we could do the easier one first to see if I was up for the excitement, but no such luck. Tickets are only $3 a person, so we bought five tickets for both tours figuring that if I opted out of Balcony House, we could consider my ticket a $3 donation. I labored over whether or not I should do the tour, but in the end, I decided that the boys would have more fun if I weren’t there screaming at them to “stay back,” “don’t lean over that,” “slow down,” “be careful!”

We had some time to kill before the guys went on the first tour, so we drove around the central part of the mesa. The trees were all dead and the top was really barren. We found out that in 2002 there had been a huge fire. The rangers had been expecting it, since it was such a dry summer, so they’d prepared the dwellings to survive the blaze, but the land was not so lucky. The fire was so hot, it burned three feet into the ground, killing all roots and seeds that might have begun new growth, so experts estimate that it could take up to 200 years for the mesa to become re-treed.

Our first stop after buying tickets was Spruce Tree House, which is a self-guided tour. This dwelling is located pretty low in the canyon, so I had no height issue with it once we reached it. It contained the only kiva that tourists are allowed to enter. Archeologists believe that the kivas were ceremonial pits and because they are of spiritual importance, people are not to enter them. The one we entered was a reproduction. We climbed through a hole in the ground, down an eight foot ladder into a round room that was possibly 10 feet across. The roof was made of logs and mud filled in the holes. This kiva had a roof to it; all the others were holes in the ground because the wood had rotted and disappeared since people lived in the area. But when people were there, the only evidence of the kivas would have been the small holes through which the ladder stuck up.

We met a ranger at Spruce Tree who was a Rockies fan and was less than pleased with Trey’s Red Sox shirt. Jeff said, “Oh ya, I’d forgotten who we beat that year.” He said, “More like crushed under your foot.” He ended up being the guide on the Balcony House Tour.

On the way to Balcony House, we stopped at the Cliff Canyon lookout, where we could see three former dwellings. The House of Many Windows had, as the name implies, many windows. A little farther down the road was Hemenway House, which has a great deal left to it.

While my guys went on the Balcony House tour, which takes an hour, I sat in the van and worked on my blog. When they returned, Jeff said it was really interesting to learn about how the people had created damns up top to control the water; otherwise, they would have had no water up top. The boys all said that if the guy hadn’t talked, they could have gotten through the ruins in about 10 minutes. They’re really bothered by all the educational stuff; they just want the climbing.

The Cliff Palace Tour was also an hour. It had five 8-to-10-foot ladders along with a 100-foot vertical climb to exit, but everyone said it was not at all scary. They were right. I was very comfortable the whole time. We learned that the people of the area, now referred to as Ancestral Puebloans rather than Anasazi (which they were originally called by anthropologists), arrived around 1,400 years ago and made Mesa Verde their home. They hunted and gathered, staying in the area for 700 years, living the last two generations of that time in the cliff dwellings. They eventually moved on, probably because life got too hard to stay. The Cliff Palace that we toured had about 60 kivas, but only about 120 people appeared to have lived right there, so they suspect that Cliff Palace was a kind of “big city” where people would gather and all the smaller dwellings along the valley were the “neighborhoods.”

What I picture when I see these dwellings are all the mothers carrying their tiny babies up and down the cliff walls and watching as their older but still small children made the climb themselves. I wonder how many young lives were lost on this terrain. But that could be just me, since I’m so bothered by the height issue.

What amazes me about these people is that, despite the hardships of their lives, they did beautiful beadwork on their clothes and their children’s toys (the museum had a little girl’s doll carrier, and it was beautifully beaded). They also had such a sense of loyalty, community, and companionship that they had pet dogs.

Just as our tour ended, the skies opened up. It was pouring over us, and directly in front of us was clear blue. What a fickle sky. We drove around the Mesa Loop to check things out from the car. We got out once in a while to check out the pithouses, which were enclosed within garage-looking buildings to protect them. Pithouses were the earliest form of housing on the mesa. The people would dig holes then build up walls and put roofs on them. Now they’re just holes in the ground, some deeper than others.

When we stopped near Square Tower House, the lightning was flashing brightly not too far away. We sat in the van for a while, waiting out the worst of it. Then the boys began to fight, and I decided that I’d rather be struck by lightning than listen to their fighting any longer, so I took the 500 foot walk to the lookout and got some good photos.

After all the driving around, it was time for dinner. The kids weren’t thrilled with having tuna sandwiches, and it was close to Jeff’s last night with us, so we decided to celebrate with dinner in town. Cortez was nearest to us, so that’s where we headed, and Lee found us what turned out to be an excellent Mexican restaurant called Tequilas. The food was great, and the boys got churros for dessert. Cal had been talking about churros the whole ride, and he finally got to eat some. They’re apple-filled pastries, and this place put honey and cinnamon over them. Yummy!!

When we got back to camp, Parker and I started our Bananagram wars, and the little girl next door, Lily, came by to see if the boys wanted to play kick the can. Cal said he would so Trey did, also. Another little girl, Samantha, also played. Samantha was German and spoke very little English, so it was a challenge, but Cal teamed up with her and Lily and Trey teamed up, and they had fun. Trey said that Lily obviously liked him because she tried to hold his hand at one point. My little lady’s man.

For corresponding photos, go to:
http://www5.snapfish.com/snapfish/thumbnailshare/AlbumID=1893275027/a=2740108027_2740108027/otsc=SHR/otsi=SALBlink/COBRAND_NAME=snapfish/