Living on the Edge

Yesterday morning, we headed up the steep and winding access road into Mesa Verde National Park. Our first stop was the visitor's center, to buy tickets for a guided tour of one of the cliff side pueblos. After consulting with a Park Ranger, my MIL decided that she wasn't physically up to the rigors of the hike involved, so we bought four tickets, and set off to the cliffs. We stopped at the Spruce Tree House pueblo, which is a self-guided tour, with fully paved walkways. It still involves a long climb in and out of the canyon, but my MIL survived the trip. She then headed in to explore the museum while the rest of us headed for the Cliff Palace pueblo for our guided tour.

The Cliff Palace is the largest of the cliff dwelling structures in the park, with more than 100 rooms. Archaeologists used to think that several hundred people lived here, but now they believe that only about 23 of the rooms were living quarters. The now believe that the Cliff Palace was a ceremonial/social gathering place where people from the numerous surrounding pueblos came together.

Our tour took us down a steep, narrow set of steps carved into the sandstone walls of the canyon. The park ranger leading our tour was told us about the changing theories about the ancestral puebloan people who lived on Mesa Verde, and noted that there is much we don't yet understand about how they lived, and why they left.

The tour took us down into the pueblo itself, allowing us to walk right up to (but not into) the buildings. After telling us about the ruins and the people that built them, we were given time to explore before making our way back to the top of the canyon wall, where our cars were parked. The trail up was even steeper than the path in, and included several short ladders. Along the way, we glimpsed some of the finger and toe holes the ancestral puebloans had carved into the sandstone to climb the canyon walls. These were ample motivation for anyone with doubts about climbing the wooden ladders provided for modern visitors.

After collecting my MIL, we did a quick tour around the mesa top, before descending back towards the valley below. After a desperately needed stop for fuel (I was very glad the trip out of the park was mostly down hill!), we headed off to the northwest, across the state line into Utah.

Sunset Arches

After leaving Mesa Verde National Park, we dashed across the state line into Utah and up to Arches National Park. We arrived about 6:30, just as the red evening light was starting to enhance the red sandstone of the parks rock formations. We raced against the approaching darkness to see as much of the park as we could. The views were spectacular, especially in the low light of the sunset. It was worth the effort to make it across in time for an evening visit. It is difficult to find words to adequately describe how beautiful the scenery was.

However, because of the rapidly approaching darkness, we couldn't hike many of the trails and explore some of the more remote rock formations. I'm sure that many of them would have been stunning, but it wasn't worth getting lost on the trails in the dark. Someday, we'll have to come back to explore this wonderful place more completely.

Another day, two more National Monuments

Today we headed south to the oldest of the National Monuments, Natural Bridges Natural Monument. This was an easy tour, driving the park's loop road and looking out over the stone bridges in the canyons. We learned the difference between "natural bridges" and "arches" (bridges are formed by flowing water eroding rock at curves in the sandstone canyons, while arches are formed by water seepage and freezing within the sandstone).

We then continued a bit further to the rather obscure Hovenweep National Monument, which include yet some more ancestral puebloan ruins (it seems that you can hardly throw a rock around this region without hitting some evidence of the ancestral puebloans. Here we learned a little bit more about the history and lives of the older cultures, but we decided not to hike very much of the trail around the small canyon because of the heat.

After finishing at Hovenweep, we headed southeast, towards a point that is unique in US geography. There is only one spot in the US where four states come together. Those states are Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah. The point where these states meet is on the Navajo Indian reservation, and the Navajo have set up a monument on the state lines. We posed for some pictures, each standing in a different state. As we left, we circled the parking lot around the monument, thus driving through four states in about a minute!

We are now back in New Mexico, spending the night before heading west in the Arizona for our last stops before our journey takes us back to the north.