As usual, I woke up before everyone else in the family. I took the opportunity to use the lodge's really good wi-fi reception to check emails and the news, then did my yoga thing and went onto our private back patio. Wow, what a view. We were in the 200 buildings and could see lots of trees and grass right out over the mesa. It wasn't even 60 degrees up there, the sun was out, and there were birds chirping and ground squirrels scuttling. Yes, it was really that idyllic. I spent half an hour out there just not doing anything but smelling the air and sitting in the sun for half an hour.
By then, everyone else had sorta awoken, so we got ready, packed up the truck, went to the main lodge to check out, then headed to another nearby building for breakfast. Far Point Lodge's casual food service is run by ARA, which has obviously made tons of improvements since my days in the North Tower. Hoss had eggs and potatoes and the rest of us had biscuits and gravy- although my gravy had chorizo and chipotles in it. Yuuummmm. We filled our refillable water bottles from Grand Canyon Railway with water, looked in the gift shop- which had some pretty cool things- and went on to the cave dwellings.
There are two routes around Mesa Verde, one of which is more well-traveled than the other. We stuck to that one because we had a specific goal in mind- Balcony House. As we drove down that road, we stopped at the Far View Sites Complex, home to several "excavated and stabilized" houses of the Ancestral Puebloans. Got some great photos, read the signs and learned lots of stuff. We kept on going down to the visitors' center and bought tickets for the next Balcony House tour, which wasn't for two hours. We all wandered around the museum learning about Ancestral Puebloan life in the area, and Hoss took the opportunity to get his second Junior Ranger badge of the trip. After that, we walked down the mountainside to the free cliff home exhibit- Spruce Tree House. The walk down (not to mention back up!) is quite steep, but there are handrails where you need them. You still need to take it slowly even if you're in good shape because you're two miles up and the air's so darn thin. Spruce Tree House is the 3rd largest cliff dwelling in the park, and was probably home to about 60-80 people. There were two rangers onsite who answered tons of questions, and a restored kiva- underground ceremonial chamber- that we could climb down into.
Amusing (I thought) sidebar: I happened to be wearing a UH shirt that day, and a guy in front of me wearing an A&M shirt was descending the ladder to go into the kiva. He wondered aloud what would happen if he got stuck down there. I quipped, "You'll be fine. There's a welcoming committee of four Longhorns down there waitin' for ya." He looked up at me, saw my shirt, and responded, "Welp, we better pull up this ladder. Can't expose Colorado to those T-Sips!" (Note: 94CougarGrad does not particularly favor UT over A&M or A&M over UT. She just thought it was kinda cool to run into someone from back home out in the wilderness of Colorado.)
We made our way- very slowly- back up to the visitors' center, refilled our water bottles, and hit the loo. Then we drove down to Balcony House for our tour. The largest cliff dwelling at Mesa Verde is Cliff Palace. It's got over 150 rooms and is the most famous and publicized of the dwellings. Everybody goes there. We chose Balcony House because it was a little less traveled, and it happens to be home to the only geocache in the entire span of Mesa Verde. This geocache is special- it's called an Earthcache. There isn't a container to look for and sign a little paper log; you look up the cache on the geocaching.com website, read about it, and answer the questions or do the activities the cache owner tells you to answer/do. We had to answer three questions that could only be answered if we'd taken the Balcony House tour, and it was optional to take a photo of ourselves in Balcony House. We did both. Our ranger guide was a local high school science teacher who specializes in archeology, so she had some really interesting information about the area. While Cliff Palace is the dwelling that everybody goes to, Balcony House is the dwelling that everybody takes their kids to. Not only do you walk down the mountain, but then you climb up a 30-foot ladder anchored to the cliff, then through a dark and narrow stairway carved out of the rock, then up another ladder and there you are. It was so cool in there. And the wood shelves and other things that were in the place were the original wood that was put there by the Ancestral Puebloans a thousand years ago. It's still preserved and in good shape because the structure of the cliff doesn't allow rain- when it does come- to get very far into the dwelling at all. The wood has stayed dry all these years, so no decay or rot, according to our ranger guide. In fact, it did rain a bit on our tour, but we didn't get hit by a drop.
To leave Balcony House, you have to climb up another ladder- and yes, you are exposed over the cliff. Don't look down, and don't look behind you. I'm not kidding; the guides tell visitors this. If you look, you'll freeze, and that slows down everybody behind you. Even if you're not afraid of heights, you will be. Once you're at the top of the ladder and your feet are on solid rock at the top of the cliff, you can look. Oh, and that doesn't include the little surprise we got just before that- to get to that last anchored ladder, we had to crawl through an 18-inch-wide space that was dark and had a large bump in the middle rising from the floor. See, once upon a time, Balcony House was the only one of these cliff dwellings that had its own spring within it- a source of drinking water. In the 1280s, a drought began, and the residents of Balcony House started restricting their neighbors from coming to get water. To assist with the restrictions, additional walls were built in strategic places, as well as this narrow crawl space and the bump in the floor. It's believed that these spaces were made narrow enough that only one person at a time could get through them, and Balcony House residents could station a teenage boy in the crawl space to keep watch for non-Balcony House residents who were trying to sneak water. It was about 10 years after that that the Ancestral Puebloans abandoned the area, and it's believed to be because of that drought. The spring is still active, but park service has redirected it to keep it from flowing through Balcony House.
So my hubby eyeballed the 18-inch-wide crawl space and his tailgating belly, and right then, someone asked our guide, "What if you get stuck in there?" She smiled brightly and said, "I've been doing this for 10 years and never had anyone get stuck!" Hubby turned to me and remarked, "That doesn't mean some other ranger hasn't..." We let Big'Un and Hoss go first, and they had no trouble. Hubby was next while I wondered what I and the Hips That Have Borne Two Children would do to navigate this thing. Hubby made it through and called to me, "Hey, it's not so bad. Just turn yourself kinda diagonal and scoot through slowly." Well, it worked, and other than the surprise bump in the floor, it wasn't bad at all. Then we hit that final ladder and I stared at my knuckles the entire way up. When I got to the top, I turned around to look where I'd been hanging on for dear life, and wow, was it gorgeous. This really is something you don't see every day, and more people should take the time to visit spots like this in our country. There were people on our tour from France, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, and Finland. Oh, and Japan. They were all as mesmerized as I was.
We'd thought about going back to tour Cliff Palace as well, but decided against it, as the thunderstorm began looming again. Instead, we drove back to the main park road, stopping at all the scenic overlooks on the way and getting out to look at more cliff dwellings and archeological sites. We made our crawl back down the mountain at 15 and 20 mph in mist and drizzle. When we got back to the highway, it was pouring, and it took us an hour to drive the 30 miles to Durango, our destination for the night. Again, lots of green and trees and mountains and pretty scenery. Elk and deer milling about in broad daylight.
Durango is on the Animas River. We arrived about 3pm and had snacked in the truck, so we checked into the hotel and parked the truck to take a nice stroll down the sidewalks near part of the river. Lots of people were out biking, walking with and without dogs, and tubing or canoeing. Again, barely 60 degrees, and we found ourselves almost wishing we hadn't worn shorts. We spent probably two hours there, then drove up the mountain to Fort Lewis College, which has several scenic overlooks where you can see all of Durango. We saw the women's softball team and men's and women's lacrosse teams practicing, and holy mackerel, there were huge elk and deer just wandering around campus like it was no big deal. Apparently it wasn't. Hubby's trigger finger began to twitch, but he stifled his inner hunter and enjoyed the view.
By the time we were done lookin' at stuff, we were hungry, and we drove back down to town to see what we could find. We hit upon The Palace, which is situated right next to the railway station for the Durango-Silverton Railroad. The place is redone quite nicely and has that classy Western parlor-slash-tavern feel. Menus indicated some upscale casual dining- I wondered what the hell was in a $19 plate of chicken and dumplings- but our waitress informed us that Monday night is burger night, and that sounded great to us. $6.00 for a 1/3-to-1/2-lb. burger with regular fries, and pick your own toppings. Or upgrade to sweet potato or truffle fries for a little extra. Local and national beer is sold there, and a very local Durango brewery that offers beer also makes sodas, so the boys ordered root beer. Wow, those were good. As were the burgers and truffle fries. Oh, and the opening pot stickers. The guys sitting at the table next to ours happened to be college students who were working at one of the river rafting companies in town for the summer, and they were really friendly and gave us lots of tips about the area. I wish we'd planned to spend more time there, darn it all. We need to go back and go river rafting.
We were fairly beat, so we drove back to the hotel. I noticed a laundromat a block away and freshened up our clothes while Hubby and the boys watched the home run derby. I tried to get online but wasn't having regular luck, so I conked out fairly early, probably before everybody else.
