Blogs from Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado, United States, North America

If you are at all interested in American Indian cultures and/or archeology, you must put this National Park on your “bucket list”. There are over 4,500 archeological sites within the park with 600 of them being cliff dwellings. Sunday, May 6th 62 degrees at 10:00 with blue skies. 25054 is our starting mileage. As we left our camp site, we saw about 7 does in the underbrush/trees in back of the bathrooms. Up, up, up we climbed to the top of the next mesa at about 8,000 feet. Our first overlook was a view of the valley below and a glimpse of the old roadbed along knife edge. The park was a popular place in the early 1900’s for drivers of the new automobiles who wanted to challenge the steep grades of this park. Only the ... read more

Since learning as a kid that the Anasazi suddenly disappeard from Mesa Verde - and seeing the classic cliff dwelling photos from there - I've been dying to go there. Somehow in other SW trips I'd never been close enough to visit, so coming here was one of the big anticipations of the trip. It started unexpectedly - climbing 3,000 (?) feet or so along a seemingly endless road w/ steep drop-offs. I hate driving roads like that!!!! :( (how do you make an EEK! face?) :) If I hadn't really wanted to see the dwellings in person, I might have turned around! There are a LOT of cliff dwellings and mesa top pueblo-ish dwellings at MV. The number is astonishing, especially after the remoteness of the desert I'd been traveling through previously. Many thousands of ... read more

September 6-8: Why do we make the choices we make? Sometimes by logic, perhaps more often by “feel”. Sometimes our lives are fairly routine and there seem to be few choices to ponder beyond the groceries. On this trip we're making choices constantly, such is the butterfly life. In 1960, when I was 12, our whole family piled in the blue Dodge sedan and off we went to California! (from Massachusetts, that is from the east coast to the west coast of the USA) I had little idea of what this would mean when I was first fighting for the place I wanted in the back seat, but over the next THREE weeks (I kid you not) our family travelled about 10,000 miles and names like Kansas and Yellowstone and Disneyland and Crater Lake materialized from ... read more

Showed up at Mesa Verde on July 3rd. Not a good visit. Dual total battery failures on the RV during the night. That sent me to Cortez on the 4th of July looking for batteries. There is only one place in Cortes to purchase deep cycle batteries on the 4th. Wal-Mart. I was attempting to have a Wal-Mart free vacation. Other than the battery purchase, I did have a Wal-Mart free trip. The lesson here is to load-test the batteries before a long trip. The Junior Ranger Badge was the best thing that happened at Mesa Verde this year. ( Well, they did fix the conflicting signs).... read more