Mesa Verde National Park -

  Cortez, Colorado, United States
Tuesday, August 5, 2008

When I first plotted out the trip, I thought we would go from Moab to Monument Valley, but the nice thing about traveling by RV is that you can easily change which way the road takes you. This was true of our decision to go to Mesa Verde National Park instead. Mesa Verde is in the southwest corner of Colorado near the four corners. It is also another one of Colorado's wine producing regions! We just can't seem to go very far without going to a wine tasting room. We pulled into the RV park in the nearby town of Cortez, got set up, and then set out for Mesa Verde to get tickets to see the ancestral pueblo cliff dwellings. Mesa Verde was home for a Native American Pueblo Indian culture from about 500 AD to 1200 AD. Then, in the course of only a few generations, they all left, abandoning their homes and dispersing to the pueblos that are still left today. There are many theories about the cause of this departure, famine, drought, overpopulation, fire, etc., but no one will ever know for sure. Since the entire park is a World Heritage site, access to the dwellings is only with a ranger-led tour.
 
On the way to the visitor center, we stopped at Park Point Overlook,

Park Point View

the highest spot in the park. We hiked up to the fire lookout station at the top and could see for miles. Mesa Verde continually has lightning sparked fires and the Park Point Overlook had been a target in 2000. The standing snags gave the landscape a ghostly appearance.

Ghostly Trees

As we were leaving the overlook, I realized that we were almost out of gas and we were fifteen miles from the nearest gas station. Fortunately, we could coast most of the way back! We refueled and retraced our steps, ending up at the visitor's center just before 5:00PM. We got tickets to see two of the cliff dwellings the next day, Long House in the morning at 10:30AM and Cliff Palace at 2:30PM in the afternoon. The reason for the long delay between the tours was that they are on two different mesas with twenty miles of twisty turning road in between. After getting our tickets we went of to the museum which is also the site of another cliff dwelling, Spruce Tree House.

Spruce Tree House

However, since it was late, we decided to tour Spruce Tree House the next day. We headed back to Cortez and went out to dinner at a small family-owned Mexican restaurant that had been highly rated on Tripadvisor.com. It's amazing how many different places are listed there, even tiny little towns that are nothing more than small dots on the map. The restaurant was packed and when we got our dinners, we understood why. The food was fantastic, with generous portions. And on top of that, it was inexpensive. Our entire dinner, with wine and tip, was less that $50. We were definitely coming back!