mesa verde - our excellent ancient adventure-wednesday 6/21/06

i happened to wake up just as the sun was coming up, and i took a picture of it. by the time pam got up, the sun was incredibly bright and we finally got a good look at where we were.

we went down to the visitors center for breakfast. pam was starving and ate while i went up to the visitors center to get our tickets for cliff palace and balcony house. we took off for cliff house, not really knowing what we were going to see or what we were getting into!

cliff palace is the most famous of these cliff dwellings and the largest one. our park ranger was a local boy, who told us all about the history of the dwellings. we learned that the ancient people were no longer called ANASAZI anymore. they were now being referred to as ANCIENT PUEBLOANS. apparently, the word anasazi is navajo for something negative, so i guess the park service decided to switch titles. it turns out that these ancients lived up on top of the mesa for most of the time they were there, and eventually came down under to the cliffs to live. it looks as if drought was the reason they went below, and drought which eventually drove them out of these mountains for good!

balcony house was a bit different, and certainly much more of a challenge. we had to climb 2 ladders, one of them 30 ft. up, to get to the ruins. the guide to this one was a girl from maine, and she told us a lot about the plants as well as the history. this particular set of ruins had several kivas as well as a room that had a petroglyph. i was fascinated by the fact that the logs that were used in building these dwellings were still here. they had not disintegrated over these hundredds of years! we had to climb out of a narrow tunnel to get out of this dwelling, and i wasn't sure i was going to make it! i had to take off the backpack, and pam got a picture of me as i emerged, triumphant, from this little prison! god help the tremendously fat person who tries that one...hey might end up stuck there!

we left balcony house and drove around the mesa top looking at pit houses and other ruins. we visited spruce tree house on our own, and it had a mock up of a real kiva as well as some incredible smoke and soot on the ceiling of the dwelling. this one actually might have been the best one of all of them. in all case, both pam and i were discretely snagging rocks during the whole park visit. we talked to a woman who was a special ed teacher from wisconsin, and this was where i learned that i have been pronouncing the word incorrectly. nothing like being corrected by a real cheese head! :) what was interesting about her was that she seemed to be doing all of the exploring alone!

both pam and i are on the same wavelength touring parks, which in this case, if you have seen one cliff dwelling, you have seen them all. one day in mesa verde was all we needed. by early afternoon we were out of the park and down to cortez looking for a place to eat. another walmart visited (i needed a memory card for the camera) and the name of a place to eat in town where we could get a salad (quest for greens!). we ended up at the anasazi restaurant, where pam got the best enchillada, this one cheese. there was a salad bar, thank god, and pam and i both got indian fry bread, my first experience with that. how wonderful! you eat them hot with honey. we carried the remains with us once again! after lunch (we got in the habit of eating b/w 2-3 pm every day) we headed out to four corners.