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Published: September 16th 2007
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Cliff Palace - Mesa Verde NP
21 families lived at cliff palace We decided to have breakfast out this morning. We stopped at a restaurant with lots of cars outside and figured it must be a great place to eat. Well there was only one waitress and we waited 20 minutes just to get a cup of coffee and 45 minutes for our food.
We drove to Cortez, Colorado and stopped at the Welcome Center there and I picked up a free t-shirt I ordered a couple of months ago. This is the first time for Dave in this state. We were able to get a new cable to use to attach my computer to my cell phone at the Radio Shack in Cortez. I broke the old one a couple of days ago and was afraid I wouldn’t be able to get a new one until we hit a big city.
We arrived at Mesa Verde National Park at mid-morning. We stopped at the visitor center and bought tickets to see the Cliff Palace and the Balcony House for $3 per person each. The only way to see these two places are on a ranger-led tour. We stopped at Spruce Tree and I saw the cliff dwelling while Dave put
all the containers in the van - bear country again. We bought apples, granola bars and a brownie for lunch since we were short on time for the first tour.
We arrived the Cliff House and were surprised we could see the whole think from the overlook. We did take the tour and got a close up look of the kivas and all the rooms in the dwelling. There were 21 families who shared this dwelling.
We then went to Balcony House, we were going to skip this tour if we could see it from the overlook, but there was no overlook - we were standing above it and could not see it. Our tour was for 2:00 pm and it was only 1:00 pm. I lucked out because I guy from this tour wanted to do the next one - so I traded tickets with him. Dave sat this one out.
To get to the cliff walk you need to climb a 32 foot ladder - I didn’t look down. We had to use foot holds to get from one section to the other and then to exit you needed to crawl through a very small
The 32 Foot Ladder
This is the way into the dwellng tunnel - my camera almost wouldn’t fit through with me. The tour was awesome and the ranger, Bruce was very informative. Two families shared this dwelling. From the balcony I could see a smaller dwelling across the way - I am not sure but I think it was the Heneway House.
We were going to get a campsite at a Passport America campground across from the park, but they wanted $21 for a tent site with no utilities and with our Passport we could get a site with full hook-ups for $16.50. This was our first attempt to use our passport and we were really disappointed that they wouldn’t give us a tent site for the $16.50. We checked out another passport campground and it was a real dump. We decided to take our chances 11 miles south of Cortez at Ute Mountain and were pleasantly surprised that it was a nice clean and neat campground behind a casino. We found out that Credence Clearwater Revisited was playing in an outdoor concert here tomorrow. We watched “Grizzly Man” for our movie tonight. Boy am I glad I didn’t see this while I was still in bear country.
Balcony House
Can you see why they call it Balcony House
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