Leaving Mesa Verde

Today we will drive to Canyon de Chelly in Northern Arizona. We will camp 2 nights on a reservation and have a native guided tour into the ruins there.

But our last 2 days here have been sensational. On Saturday we took the tour of Long House built in another part of the park. In was inhabited from 1205 until 1280. No preservation was done on any of the structure. It was dramatic and our ranger guide was sensational. He is a retired college professor and had the gift of being a natural teacher. After the tour he talked about the Ute Indians. They were moved to this area onto this reservation, but this land has little water and terrible soil. Then after the ruins were found in 1880, their reservation area was greatly reduced because the government knew that this was a special place. Mesa Verde is totally fenced but somehow, those Ute horses make it through the fence and cause havoc! The males are very territorial and keep other animals away from the springs, plus they are aggressive and make quite a mess with their huge dumps! Pay back time??!?






No one knows why the cliff dwellers left this area but their present day descendants, the Hopi and Pueblos, say that they did not abandon the dwellings but moved on. We did go to the Anasazi Heritage Center in Cortez. It was a very informative place and did a wonderful job of connecting the ancient people of this area to our present Native Americans.

Yesterday the kids left for Golden and we took an amazing ride up to Telluride, then back through Ouray and dinner in Durango. The drive was so dramatic, especially the stretch after Ouray. Even with all of our drives during last September's trip, we both felt that this was the most dramatic drive that we have ever taken.
The camera does not come even close to capturing the red color of the sandstone - sorry.





Telluride town first and mountain village second






Seth - lots of mountain biking here in Telluride, found this Yeti for you



For the next 2 days I doubt that we will have any Internet access so you won't hear from us again for awhile.

Hope you are all well and enjoying the beauty of September days!

Thinking of you all.

Just a few family shots in closing












And last, the blue moon.
J/K




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Location:U.S. 160,Cortez,United States

Mesa Verde Day #2

This has been an amazing adventure. We left Golden on Wednesday morning in 2 cars, Seth pulling a travel trailer and Ken and Jeanne pulling the Casita. Our group is 5 adults (Seth, Hope, Cheryl, Ken and Jeanne) and Emi and Winn.

Yesterday we toured two dwellings and we were very hot and exhausted (and just a touch cranky) when we got back to the RV park. Today we were much smarter - did one dwelling this morning and then back to the park to nap, swim and relax. Will follow the same routinely tomorrow.

The dwellings are truly amazing. These natives once lived on top of the Mesa, but then moved below the mesa to build the dwellings into the sandstone cliffs. Every day they would go up to the Mesa to tend to the corn, cut wood, hunt for small animals (all of the large animals were gone). The heat is intense and lightning strikes would start fires. It is estimated that it takes 300 years for a mature tree to come back and they were dependent on the wood for fires and construction of the cliff dwellings. They do not think that the dwellings were defensive but it's hard to believe this. The dwelling that we went to today had only one entrance through a small tunnel in the stone with lookout advantage that was extensive. How could this not have been defensive?

The following pictures are from the Balcony House dwelling where about 40 people lived.

This is the entrance and the first of several ladders that we had to climb, Winn slept through this climb!









Some shots of Balcony House with the last photos being the way out for us (but the way in for the natives).























It was hard to get good pictures of the Balcony House since we never saw it from a distance but just climbed right in to it.

The following are some photos of the Cliff House, a much larger structure. They believe that it might have been used as a meeting place since it was large. This dwelling is often the one that you see in history books, etc.




The larger sunken structure was a kiva, used for ceremonial purposes. It was covered with a wooden ceiling (all of them have collapsed).




And I'll end this posting with some good time shots. Hope that you are all well and enjoying the Labor Day Weekend.















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Location:Cortez, Colorado

The Start

We started our adventure leaving Mercer on Wednesday, 8/22 with our first stop being Golden. But 2 minutes down the road we headed back home having forgotten the extra credit card.
Three days later we arrived in Golden and were greeted by Seth, Hope, Emi and Winn.