Day #4—Mesa Verde Tour & Rodeway Inn Monticello, UT--May 26, 2011

1076 miles on the odo 

Got up at 6:30 this AM and broke camp before going to the campground café (told you I was roughing it) and having a pancake breakfast. At breakfast I met an interesting couple from Chicago. She was a travel journalist but I don’t remember what he did other than grow container gardens. We had breakfast together and then they went on one tour and I on another. Cannot remember their names. 

The tour leader, Sharon, had been on the job only three days, but she was knowledgeable and a great driver on these cliff-hanging, s-curved roads. She’d been a driver’s ed teacher in a previous life. There were only seven of us (three couples and me—one couple from France with little English) which made for a good group. 

An unflattering pic of Sharon

If you haven’t been to Mesa Verde, you really must go. It is stunning how these ancient (550 -1300 AD) Puebloan people built their houses and granaries in cliff-side niches and holes in the ground. Just shaping the sandstone and getting it up and down would have been a feat. They used hand and toe holds to get to the mesa above to tend their crops, and I shudder to think of it. Wonder at what age the children were taught to monkey climb out. 

We ate our lunch in a picnic grove, and then returned the 17 miles back to the campground in late afternoon. I immediately took off for Monticello. My eyes were very tired after so much sun, binocular, and camerawork, so on arrival in Monticello, I took a nap, took a shower, and fixed myself a hot meal from my camp kitchen, in that order. Then I got out the bike, pumped the tires, rounded up my bike duds, and prepared for my ride to Moab tomorrow. 

Temps were in the low 70s today with a south wind. Hope that holds for tomorrow also. Cannot report from Moab as I will not have my computer etc., but will be back at this motel on the 28th, and shall recount my ride to and from then. 

The series of doorways  above led one into the first ruin we stopped at, which was chronologically one of the last built. It shows the influence of the Chaco Canyon peoples who were very advanced architecturally.

These cliffs were near the road on the way to the cliff dwellings. My group stopped here for a history lesson and to look into the Montezuma Valley. Hundreds of thousands of ancient Publoan peoples inhabited this valley and then moved for some unknown reason to the protection of the cliffs and grew corn on the plateau above the cliffs. 

The first ruins we looked at were not tucked into the cliffs but built atop the mesa. The horses in the photo above belong to someone in the valley who does not feed, ride, or vet them and they have gone wild (feral). Each time he rounds them up and takes them miles away, they return to Mesa Verde National Park. There are about 30 left in the herd. The Park would like to be done with them but visitors like me love to see them. The foal is about 3 weeks old.

We walked down to Spruce Tree House and got a good close-up view of the architecture. The two kivas at this site were roofed and one could climb down into one of them (ladder top left). The rooms extended far back into the cave niche, the ceilings still blackened with soot. The black streaks on the cliff face in the bottom right photo are not soot but a type of algae. Left bottom photo shows three corn grinding areas.

Below are some photos of Cliff Palace and some other cliff dwellings along the same canyon wall. Cliff Palace has 150 rooms and 23 kivas. It is thought to be the largest cliff dwellings in North America. the bottom two photos show the canyon entire and how the mesa atop the cliffs looks today after a series of fires. 

Arrived at the Rodeway Inn with plenty of time to rest and relax and catch up on my journal. It's plain jane but clean and warm.