Dietz Summer Road Trip

We have gone on 3 Ranger guided tours of Mesa Verde, all of which citing the main reason that the Ancient Pueblos moved into the cliffs was to free up space for farming on the Mesa tops for the ever expanding population. Well, we think we know the real reason… They were sick of hail storms in July! We had one here yesterday and stayed safe and about 99% dry in our tent. But lets back up and talk about what we did earlier that day.

This morning we woke up and actually got to make breakfast at camp. We only ruined one pan to the point it could not be saved and had eggs, hash browns, tea and coffee. We showered and drove about 45 minutes to the other side of the park for the guided tour of Long House. This was a 2 hour tour, which was about 2 miles round trip with many stops to hear from the Ranger. Our ranger was Ranger Marie, and it was her last day! Her and her husband are moving to Denver so she got a little emotional at the end of the tour. But she did a great job, you could tell she really loved Mesa Verde.

We started down a path that eventually took us to Long House. It is one of the oldest dwellings here at Mesa Verde. Along the way you can see hand and toe paths in the rock that the people use to use to enter/exit these dwellings daily. We on the other hand use the man-made ladders.

There are only 3 guided tours at Mesa Verde and we have now done them all. This one might of been our favorite because it was much more detailed and you got to see a lot of the things that the museum and other tours reference. This dwelling for example has a seep spring right there which is where they collected daily water. However they would still have to make the 11+ mile round trip to get water from the closest main water source everyday if they needed more than the spring could produce.

We were able to walk all around the structure, which is amazing that The National Park Service just let us walk around sites that date back to the 7th century! Here are some more pictures:

You are able to walk the path back on your own and take as much or as little time as you want. There were feral horses that ran around that came onto the park from nearby Ute land. 

  
  There was another self-guided structure you could see near Longhouse, but it was time for lunch and after 4 dwellings we figured we got the point of it by now. I think we are good to go on cliff dwellings. So we went to the park restaurant for lunch. The food here is surprisingly good, maybe we were expecting it just to be over priced chicken fingers and fries like at a Smithsonian, but both lunches we have had here have been good. Danielle got Black bean soup made with green chiles (going to eat as much of them as possible before heading back east!) and fry bread. Fry bread is the amazing combination of 2 guilty pleasures, Carbs and Fried Food. John got a decent pizza and a even more decent Colorado brew.

We have been gone now for over a week and needed to do some laundry. So we took the rest of the afternoon to do some everyday things. There were laundry facilities right near the camp store/showers. We washed all of our clothes, reorganized the truck, charged our electronics, and just hung out. All of the driving and constant on-the-go has really caught up with us. So it was good to just not have any plans and return to normalcy for a bit. After laundry was done we headed back to the campsite and hung out for awhile, reading. We were just entertaining the idea of starting to make dinner when we heard that familiar sound of thunder. So we waited a little bit hoping it would blow over. Instead it headed right for us. We quickly gathered everything up and sought refuge in the tent. The rain quickly began to get heavier until finally it turned to hail! The storm lasted for over an hour and it was about 7:30pm when we emerged from the tent.

There was no rainbow and it still looked like it might start raining again. Instead of risking getting caught in it again while making dinner, we thought we would take the safe bet and head back into Cortez for something. How wrong we were, because we were down to one lane traffic because of land-slide after the storm. Again, glad we bought a truck! (Which by the way seems to of escaped any hail damage). Not knowing how long the clean up would take we went to a place in town called J.Fargo’s, which promised family dining and micro-brews. But it was more like “I don’t know who my waitress is” and “this is beer in a academic sense that it is fashioned with some sort of water and hops.” We headed back onto the park and to the campground. We had to wait for the single lane traffic to come through because they had a bulldozer now cleaning up the road. It was almost all cleared up by the time we passed.

It was about 9:30pm, on the pajamas went and to bed. We are planning to sleep in tomorrow and head into Durango for the 4th of July!

BTW: The Finger is getting stronger by the day. We are down to only Neosporin and a bandaid duo.