Today we were up and out by 5 am for our 3 hour and 40 minute drive to Mesa Verde National Park. Lunch and snacks were packed the night before so all we had to do was wake up, grab our packs (and coffee) and go.
Leaving so early we were almost the only car on the road. As the sky lightened with sunrise, we were able to take in more of the sights along the way. We drove by the snow covered peaks of the San Juan mountains, saw several herds of elk grazing in fields, cross country ski tracks in the snow along the roadside and even a mostly frozen lake.
About an hour and a half into the trip, the terrain completely changed. No longer were there jagged snowy peaks. Instead. tree covered mountains where the dark green of the ponderosa pines contrasted with the white bark of the aspens that are just starting to show their leaves.
With one hour left to go, we roll through the town of Delores, population 901. On the other side of town, we find the terrain change again, opening up into a wide valley, with Mesa Verde National Park rising up straight ahead of us.
We had booked a 9 am ranger-led tour of Cliff Palace, the largest cliff dwelling in Mesa Verde National Park. We met our tour guide and the rest of the tour group at the overlook to Cliff Palace and began the tour with a walk down steep carved stone steps. The tour group gathered at one end of the dwelling and listened as our ranger, Maggie, told us about the history of the dwellings and the lives of the inhabitants. The Ancestral Puebloans who occupied the dwellings began building around 1190, but abandoned the sites around 1300, probably due to resource constraints brought on by several megadroughts. More stone steps, narrow sandstone passes, and multiple wooden ladders brought us to the end of our tour.
After Cliff Palace, we got out on the trails. Our first hike, Soda Canyon Trail, gave us the opportunity to view across the canyon another well-known dwelling, Balcony House. The mesas and canyons were so vast it was hard to take everything in and of course, pictures just don’t do it justice. We all kept saying, “Wow.” We had no other way to describe the beauty. After Soda Canyon, we stopped for a picnic lunch, and then tackled Petroglyph Point TrailL, a 2.4 mile trail along stone steps, narrow ridges and abandoned dwellings. The highlight was a large petroglyph panel with over 30 figures of hands, spirals and animal figures.
Thankfully the hike back to the start was on top of the mesa, and we were glad to be done with stone steps! We were all pretty drained from the combination of an early start, long drive, hours out in the sun, and time on our feet, so we said goodbye to Mesa Verde and headed back to our home for the week.
And….two of us now have trail names. Carol earned the trail name Fact Finder, for her ability to find the answer to all our oddball road trip questions.
Tomorrow: Black Canyon of the Gunnison!
Adventures in Colorado, 2023 edition 