Every once in a while, Lee's birthday coincides with Labor Day weekend. This year, his Birthday falls on the Friday before Labor Day, so I thought it would be fun to celebrate somewhere a little more interesting than home. So Thursday we checked kids out of school a little early and headed out on an epic road trip to Colorado! Mesa Verde is one of the coolest national parks there is, and Lee has never been! It's a fun one for kids too, so we made it a big family affair.
On Friday morning we set out for Wetherill Mesa and did a short hike to visit Step House.
This is a small cliff dwelling built by people who lived her from about 500 AD-1300 AD. After this point it's clear they migrated south, possibly as a result of famine and drought.
Step House is one of the only cliff dwellings you can really get close to without a guided tour. Though we did have a ranger present to answer questions and make sure we didn't damage the structure.
On a relatively clear day, like the day we were visiting, you can see all the way to Shiprock and beyond. Shiprock--the jagged one pictured above--is about 50 miles away!
There are small dwellings and little grain silos built into the alcoves all over the park. Some of them seem so perilously inaccessible, I marvel at the agility and skill it takes not only to build it but then get in and out again and again.
The weather was so unexpectedly cool at pleasant, we last minute booked a tour to Long House; so called because it is the longest dwelling in the park.
It is also one of the longest tours in the park and requires a 20 minute walk to get to the starting point of the tour. I find my kids get bored with easy, flat walks, so that first part was a struggle. Once we got to climbing stairs, ladders, and scrambling over boulders, the complaints came to an end.
We had quite a small tour group and we learned a bit about how people were able to farm on the plateau, collecting good quality soil that blows in from other areas, and collect water.
This tour is pretty fun because you get to climb up into the dwelling and see the seep spring at the back of the cave.
The ranger asked if anyone had any questions and Arthur raised his hand and said, "today is my dad's birthday!" So Lee got a lot of "happy birthdays" from our group.
There is evidence to suggests that this area used to be not quite as dry as it is now. There wasn't any water to speak of in the seep spring, but at the time that Long House was occupied it would have supplied the drinking water for a community of maybe 100 people.
It was a little hard for Arthur to listen to the educational part of this tour, but he did his best and mostly didn't climb on or touch things he wasn't supposed to.
At the end of our tour, we headed back up the way we came and headed back to our car. There is more to see and do on Wetherill Mesa, but the road closes at 4PM and our tour ended at 3PM, so we had to just head out and back to our hotel. The kids would probably have been too tired for anything else anyway.
What they weren't too tired for was playing arcade games and pool in the hotel's game room and eating birthday cupcakes!
On Saturday we were joined by our Colorado cousins for some more exploration. I'd started planning this trip when my sister asked what we would be doing for Labor Day, so I invited her to jump in and join our trip.
We started our day by touring Cliff Palace: the largest cliff dwelling in Mesa Verde, not to be confused with the longest cliff dwelling. I assume it's considered the largest because it housed more people than Long House. Probably. It's all based on estimates and guesses, but it is believed that Cliff Palace at it's peak had a community of ~150 residents.
Cliff Palace is also the most popular tour; the groups are bigger, the tours are shorter but that is at least in part because it is the most easily accessible of the dwellings.
What makes Cliff Palace unique is just how big and intact many of it's buildings are. It really does have a palatial look to it.
The ancestral pueblo were very clever in building around the existing rock. Our ranger guide showed us an area where a boulder that had been used as foundation had cracked; modern structural engineers were worried it could compromise the building so they crawled underneath it and found that the ancient residents were already on it! The foundation had been really effectively repaired and patched up hundreds of years ago and it was holding up just fine.
They found ways to use the small upper ledges and chambers as long term food storage.
All over the place there are kivas, which would have had roofs with a small opening for a ladder, and the roof would help form the floor of the public spaces. I'm not sure I fully comprehend the significance of kivas, but they were family spaces and continue to be an important aspect of pueblo culture to this day.
My kids always have more fun with whatever they're doing if there are cousins coming along, this was no exception. Arthur just attached himself to Sophie whenever possible, he loves LOVES his grown up cousins.
After touring Cliff Palace, we had some leisure time to stop at some overlooks and play I Spy a Cliff dwelling. There are really so many of them!
Some of the younger children did not appreciate it at all.
What they did appreciate is when we stopped at the fry bread stand! This lovely older couple from the reservation were there cooking it to order, and boy did we order! Obviously cinnamon and sugar and honey are go tos, but the surprise favorite was garlic. The kids seriously loved fry bread with garlic! I personally liked salt and honey best. They chatted with us for a while about the history of the area. the gentleman said he used to be a trail guide and visited some pretty far out of the way dwellings.
After a fry bread/lunch break and a bit of a rest and read, we did the tour to Balcony House. It was the most challenging and hair raising, and therefore my favorite. We were guided by the same ranger who had led our group through Long House (thanks, Ranger Allie!) The approach isn't too bad at first, no worse than Cliff Palace.
But then you need to climb this 30 ft. ladder...
All the kids chose a climbing buddy, Arthur was my assigned climbing buddy with Lee right behind him. He kept stopping on the ladder to be like, "hey look a squirrel!" and every time he did I could feel all the adults watching below us hold their breath.
He made it to the top no problem. He's just always been a climber, what can I say.
Balcony House has some tight squeezes, and this isn't one of them.
Balcony House gets it's name from this still intact little walkway on the front of this building. Not many of these balconies survive, but they were seemingly a popular way to get from one second story room to another without having to go down and around.
Ducking through one of the tighter passages, it's clear why we're asked not to touch anything. It's oil from people's hands that have so thoroughly discolored this rock wall. Gross.
The real tight squeeze comes at the very end where you do need to be on your hands and knees to crawl through a tunnel to exit Balcony House.
None of our family got stuck, we did watch one of the other guests struggling a bit. It really is a narrow little passage. The exit is actually the most harrowing part of the tour. You go from ladders to carved out foot holds in the rock with little flimsy railings to hold onto. That was the actual most harrowing part of the tour.
We all lived to tell the tale and spent the evening in the game room playing board games and building structures out of dominos with Arthur. In case you were wondering, the board games were my children's favorite part of the day.
Our last day of fun with cousins didn't include any tours, instead we did a hike to Petroglyph Point.
The hike starts near the Spruce Tree House, which is currently closed due to instability, so we only saw it at a distance. Then we met a part ranger who seemed very skeptical that we could complete a two and a half mile hike.
I'm guessing the guy was just really tired of having people from cooler climates over exert themselves in the hot desert sun, but it wasn't a particularly hot morning. Maybe he thought kids wouldn't be able to do the scramble, rough steps kind of hike, but spoilers: that is the only kind of hike my kids like. Flat walks are too boring and out of the question. Or maybe he took a look at my sister and I and assumed we're out of shape. Either way, his response irked us. He said to be prepared for three hours of hiking, so we were pretty determined to do a lot faster.
And we did.
Not only is the entire first half of the hike totally in the shade (in the morning at least) it is definitely one where the journey is as good or better than the destination.
The views of the canyon were great, there were rocks to climb and little caves and nooks everywhere. Arthur was having so much fun trying to keep up with the big kids, he didn't even ask to be carried for more than a couple minutes.
We took lots of rests, drank lots of water, and made a lot of noise, so the only wild life we saw were the vultures circling over head.
There were remains of a cliff dwelling right on the trail, just a very small one with few remaining walls, but still cool.
Yes, we did make it to the Petroglyphs within about an hour of leaving the Spruce Tree House overlook. It is a pretty large panel!
The rest of the trail back towards the museum and parking is fairly level and not as shady, so I think you can imagine how the kids got cranky as soon as the hike turned into just walking.
We finished in about two hours (eat it, Ranger Rick) and rewarded ourselves with lunch at the cafe and an afternoon working on Junior Ranger badges.
Fun fact, the law enforcement rangers at the park are pretty experienced at getting into vehicles that people have locked themselves out of. Don't ask me how I know that, but just take my word for it and it may or may not have impacted how much time we spent working on Junior Ranger booklets.
We rounded out our trip to Mesa Verde with stopping off at several overlooks and archeological sites around the canyon rim. The only park tour we didn't do was the Tower House tour (which has space for only 10 guests and runs once a day, so that wasn't likely to happen). We did get to see Tower House from the overlook though!
By the late afternoon it was quite sunny and in the high 70s, so it felt decently hot. The kids were not pleased to be making all these stops and were relieved when we promised that the Sun Temple would be our final stop.
It's called the Sun Temple, but the truth is no one knows what it was for at all. There is no evidence of it being a residence and there are no structures like it elsewhere, so it is presumed to be of some significance to the wider community.
When we got back to our hotel, the kids just wanted to get back to that game room. So the adults took turns supervising them, cooking dinner, and--for my part--trying to photograph all the different blue birds that loved to fly around our room.
There was also an elk that didn't seem too perturbed by all the humans around.
There were little bunnies all over the place, as well as evidence of wild horses, though I'm sure we were never up early enough to spot them. Our first day we did spot a bobcat crossing the road, but only just a little glimpse.
We said good-bye to our cousins Monday morning and started our drive home. We took a decent little break around Moab and were making pretty good time until the fire.
I didn't take a photo or anything, but we did get stopped by a wildfire in the canyon heading into Price. We sat on the road for about an hour watching helicopters drop water on the smokey area just ahead. We finally were able to roll on through and, yeah, the fire was right up to the road. Our original hope of being home by 8PM was crushed and we finally rolled in well passed the kids bedtime. Still, I declare the weekend an success!
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