The Green Table

As you can see behind my very photogenic image here, our campsite is in the shadow of the initial mesa of Mesa Verde National Park.  Wow, what an amazing place.  The park experience starts with a somewhat harrowing drive.  In some places if you run off the road on either side you will plunge hundreds of feet to your rather messy end.  Switchbacks and hairpin turns abound, with nary a guard rail in site.

Once you arrive at the sites of ruins from  ancient Native American cliff dwellers (the reason for even daring the drive), you often find that you have to climb or descend ladders, (one of which was 32 feet high – pictured here), climb on your hands and knees through narrow tunnels, and squeeze through narrow cliff wall passages.   

If all the adventure of getting to and around the ruins wasn’t exciting enough, on their first guided tour through what is called the Balcony House site, once they got into the cliff ruins, torrential rain was followed by a tremendous crash of lightening that struck some 40 feet from where they were standing.  They actually got to see a park ranger jump about the same distance.  How do they know for sure it was that close?  After the excitement had settled and the ranger had collected herself, Dave smelled smoke.  A tree just over the “balcony” of the cliff dwelling had been struck by lightening and was now in flames.  Evidently the occurrence was not that uncommon as the whole park had been scarred by multiple forest fires caused by lightening.  It was however, quite an unusual event for my family.  They got to experience, in a very real way, what terrific shelter these Pueblo people had built for themselves.  Here is the ranger trying to decide whether to proceed on what had already become an extended tour in this pueblo.  You can see it was quite wet. 

So wet in fact, that this waterfall developed right near the 32 foot ladder they had climbed to get into the pueblo.  The ranger had never seen nor heard of this happening in this spot in her 15 years of guiding there.

In addition to being very functional and protective, these ruins, which you see me and the rest of the family pictured amongst, are engineering marvels, and well preserved works of art too.

Caleb said it best when he said, the Pueblo people certainly picked spots with great views to build their villages.  These hidden valleys are beautiful.  You can get the panoramic view of Long House Pueblo from Caleb’s video.

By the way, Mesa Verde means 'green table'.  And speaking of green tables, we met some nice folks from California whom we shared a potluck dinner with at our campsite around our green picnic table.  They shared a beef cut unknown to us Vermonters called tri-tip.  The family seemed to enjoy it – but you guessed it – I got none.  These two families sat near each other in Cortez, Colorado for what I am told was a spectacular firework display on the fourth of July.  Believe me, I chose to stay at home for this one – I don’t do fireworks…

Well, that’s all from Colorado.  We leave tomorrow for the canyons of Utah.

Big wet kisses, Mookie, “The Bloggin’ Dog”