Mesa Verde National Park is Fantastic ..a great look back into very early American history. The Park has world heritage status. In 1906 President Theodore Roosevelt established the park to "preserve the works of man"
There are nearly 5000 archaeological sites, it traces Ancestral Puebloans fromAD550 to AD1300, at which time the just moved on south and developed new communities.
We got to the park about 10 am and headed to the parks only Lodge...we got the last room but couldn't move in until 3 pm. We headed to the info center and got maps and paid passes to 2 Ranger guided historic sites... 1, Cliff Palace and 2. the Balcony House, each tour of 1 hours duration. After lunch we visited the museum, saw a film on the park and visited the Spruce Tree House.
All tours involved some fairly stiff up and down hill walking, as well as climbing ladders and crawling hands and knees through tunnels and all this at 7000 feet above sea level.
The Ranger Guided tours were very informative, interesting and for us challenging,... me a bit over weight panting and puffing with the climbs and Sandie who doesn't like heights the ladders were a real test.
To get a real feel for these communities lived have a look at the pics.
At 4 pm we were stuffed and headed for the room and a rest before dinner.
The room was much smaller than we expected, and not really conducive to a two night stay as we thought. We had dinner in the Lodge with a fantastic view to the plains below and mountains in the back ground, although not cheap we thought it was pretty reasonable value in lovely surroundings.
Tomorrow we will spend the morning seeing a few sites we missed then after lunch move on..... stay in touch to find out where to next,
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