Mesa Verde and Great Sand Dunes

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Out of the redrock summer of Utah and into spring in Colorado. The aspens are leafed out in their bright greens, and we’re loving the transition into snow-capped mountains, forests, and lakes. Our first night we make it as far as Cortez, and stop at the lovely Tomahawk Motel for the night, glad to be inside as it pours relentlessly outside. Next day head to Mesa Verde National Park. This park is full of Ancient Puebloan (a.k.a. Anasazi) houses built into the cliff faces. We toured Balcony House, which involved climbing several steep ladders and negotiating a narrow ‘hallway’ that you had to crawl on hands and knees to get through. The house is perched 600 feet above the valley, with great views. Amazingly intact rooms with windows, kivas (circular ceremonial areas), etc. The dwellings were abandoned suddenly for unknown reasons, possibly related to drought or alien abduction, as Shane (thanks to X-Files) theorizes. After an afternoon there, we hit the road and find a campground with incredibly nice camp hosts. They let us camp for free (claimed fees didn’t start until the next day) and brought us over an armload of free firewood. In the morning chatted with the camp hosts over some coffee in their RV for a while, cleaned off the chipmunk poop from our things (they’d been busy pooping all over our things while we coffee'd), and headed on to Great Sand Dunes NP.
An impressive pile of sand. Beautiful snowy mountains in the background with huge sand dunes at the base. A big thunderstorm all afternoon prevented much exploration that day, but watching the sand blow all around and reshape the dunes was neat-o. Hit up the dunes the next morning. Walked and ran up and around a few of the dunes, which include the tallest in the country. Like playing in a huge sandbox. Despite the unsatisfactory explanation of how they formed in the park literature (“sediment carried down the mountains was deposited”) we enjoyed the park. As we left the dunes, the masses were descending. Apparently the locals consider the creek and sand to be the local beach, the kids were all in bathing suits with their shovels and buckets. Off to Claire and Craig’s cabin in Westcliffe!

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