Day 16: (1of2) Monday May 18th, Four Corners

We left Mesa Verde in the morning and headed to Four Corners National Monument. It's only 40 minutes away so an easy drive and we entered New Mexico to get there.

 We got our obligatory photo standing in all four corners at the same time.  Due to the monument being on Indian reservation lands, the monument has indian gift shops all around, with lots of arts and crafts. It took awhile to look through all the stalls, but I finally ended up with two wrap around bracelets.

Day 15: Sunday May 17th, Mesa Verde

Mesa Verde:

First of all, unrelated to Mesa Verde, but necessary for any pictures to have happened, Check out this cool feature the truck has. A 120V inverter! You can plug anything into it that you would normally plug into a regular outlet, like your phone, computer or in this case, the camera battery! I had forgotten to charge the camera battery the night before, and not only that, you saw how many stops we made the previous day (Garden of the Gods,  Four Corners and Great Sand Dunes) so the battery that was in the camera only had a little bit of charge left. If we hadn't had this feature, we would have been sad puppies with no pictures. 

There is no real way to describe what it was like at Mesa Verde, but here it goes. 

Cliff Palace

Cliff Palace

Mesa Verde has been a stop I have wanted to make for years. The idea that people lived not just on cliffs, but IN the face of the cliffs just amazes me. It still does. More so now that I have seen it up close.  

Cliff Palace

The Cliff dwellers were actually living on the top of the land first and only moved inside the cliffs afterward. Speculation is that there was no more room above ground and people had to move to the inside of the cliffs. I have my doubts on that, you should see how much land there is, but who am I, certainly not an historian or archeologist. But I will say, they have not found any evidence to support any kind of warfare, so they don't think it was that. 

One thing that is consistent with above ground pit houses and cliff houses is the style of how they built. You'll see the same high threashold wall/entry, rectangular doors that are only window sized, and Kiva's; the big round circular rooms with a fire pit. All dwellings have them, and all Kiva's have the back door behind the fire circle. This is not the draft as that is located further away. This cut out, positioned behind the small barrier, is for the spirit to enter and exit from the spirit world. 

Our guide, Bennett Bear

With our guide, Bennett Bear, we were able to climb around in one of the actual cliff dwellings, Balcony House. This required lots of squeezing into tight areas,

Threshold doorways 

crawling on hands and knees, climbing up wooden ladders,

Why tunnels instead of doors?

 And Climbing on steps carved into the side of the cliff. Just like they would have done, except they wouldn't have had hand rails! They would have climbed up and down the side of this cliff two or three times a day, minimum. Whew. No wonder their entrances and doorways were so tiny,  they would have been very lean folks!





This is an area where they would have ground grain.

This is looking back across the canyon at Balcony House.

Some of the beautiful terrain we hiked around in that day.

At the end of the day, we made a fire and sat outside our R-pod enjoying the night sky, the fire, the incredible day, and drinking wine from the very stylish, yet non glass wine glasses John lent us, (thanks John Sasinowski, you can't see the wine glasses, but they are there)

Daryl's Update #1

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So we've found that most RV parks offer wireless internet and, for the most part, the quality of service is really, really bad.  Not even 56k bad, but more like smoke signals in a tunnel bad.  It probably has something to do with everyone sharing one low bandwidth connection, but even at odd hours it's not awesome.

So you will have to pardon our updates falling a bit behind.  In the mean time, I'm going to try to add my own 2¢ in smaller, less graphically enhanced posts.  In addition, I may end up working backwards in time until I catch up with Yvonne blogging forward in time.

Day 14: (3of3) Saturday May 16th, Driving to Mesa Verde National Park

After we left the Great Sand Dunes, We traveled back across most of Colorado heading towards Mesa Verde. This time south and then West. Another long drive and beautiful scenery. 

This one included a summit crossing at dusk, 

The frosty trees should have been an early warning of what was to come! 

with falling temperatures, rain that turned to snow,

  snow that turned to unplowed slippery roads, that turned to an unplanned u-turn, otherwise known as a 180. Not a sole on the road though, so Yay, no harm no foul. 

Our 180 was a slow motion event that was a gentle sliding affair. The truck and trailer gently slid as a unit, together. I was turning the wheel into the slide, keeping everything straight, but we were still going both sideways and downhill until eventually it had gone 180 degrees and we were in the snow bank on the side of the road facing the wrong way! 

And then the ever helpful GPS Nav system says "Make a U-Turn" hahaha. Okay, we'll get right on that. 

We were able to just make a wide u-turn and continue on our way. As I mentioned, no one on the road in either direction so that part was easy peasy.  The rest of the drive down ( I traded with Daryl as I was shaking like a leaf) was a white knuckle affair with Daryl Driving barely 15 mph  until we came down past the snow line and into warm rain. Whew that was a bit intense. Once we were past the snow line everything opened up beautifully. Such gorgeous scenery. 

We arrived after hours at our camp site in Mesa Verde so the check in place was closed, but they had a packet taped on the window for us, listing our camp site with a map. Backing into a camp site in the pitch dark in 29 degrees is a bit tricky. Then after about three tries, and finally getting everything set up and the leveling blocks in place and everything unlocked, locked, winched, and situated. We closed the door of our trailer, declared victory, and realized that because our leveler is on the tongue of the trailer hitch (the part that got tweaked in the 180 unplanned u-turn) We had put leveling blocks under the tire when it really didn't need any, so the trailer had a high side. We both look at each other laughed and said, "we sleep with our heads on the high side" and went to bed! 

Day 14: Saturday May 16th, Great Sand Dunes National Park

We were on the road by 12:30 pm from Garden of the Gods heading to Great Sand Dunes National Park.

Driving there, we kept thinking, We are headed towards sand dunes aren't we? shouldn't we be able to see, well, Sand and dunes? Turns out the Sand dunes are right up against the mountain, so you don't see them until you are basically on top of them. 

 

We watched the video in the visitor center that showed how the dunes were created. Basically take a dried up inland sea, add lots of one directional wind, and mountains to put the breaks on. all that sand hitting the mountains created the sand dunes. The Dunes are not growing anymore as the dried up Sea has long been blown away. But they are ever changing from one day and one moment to the next. 

To get to the Dunes you have to walk across a 'river' or a wash. It's about a hundred yards across and ranged from 3 inches deep, or to up to a foot deep if you timed it right (or wrong). The water comes in 20 second surges, so you try to time it to jog across staying ahead of the deeper surge. Zig zagging a path across. I had my rain pants and lady bug rain boots so I was all set.

Daryl crossed in his keen's with his pants rolled up. All good, except for two things, the sand in the shoes rubs against your feet, and it was COLD.

 The Rangers had said there are no trails to follow so it's a go anywhere you want. There isn't a cutoff time either so you can be out there as long as you want. The ranger told us to just keep an eye on the sky and if we hear thunder get off the dunes. You don't want to be the one item standing taller than a dune when lightening strikes! Sounds like good advice. 

It's a bit of work walking on sand dunes. Think of walking on a dry sand beach, however, that only has about a foot of loose sand. Now picture a hill full of all sand. When you step on it, it slides and your foot goes any and all directions. So you are not only working to get yourself uphill, but you are fighting to maintain your balance the whole time. The edges of the sand dunes were dramatically sharp, one side you could walk right up to the edge (though not advised as the sand shifts all the time) and the other side is just a sheer wall. (This is Daryl looking over the edge of a dune, Yikes) 

Notice the dark clouds over Daryl's shoulder? Just after this picture was taken we heard thunder. We both looked at each other and wondered if it was really thunder. Then just to make sure we understood, the sky opened up with a deep loud rolling, and rolling thunder. That got us heading back down and out in a hurry. Running down the slopes was a lot of fun!

Just as we got down from the First Dune, the dark clouds opened up. But it wasn't rain that started to pelt us, it was Hail! Yes I said Hail.

 As we made our way back, more and more hail covered the dunes until they looked like snow covered hills instead of dark tan sand dunes.

One last water crossing

and we were back to our truck

Wow what an adventure! The sand dunes are beautiful and amazing.

Day 14: (1of3) Saturday May 16th: Garden of the Gods, Manitou Springs Colorado

Saturday May 16^th: Garden of the Gods, Manitou Springs Colorado

Today is the 20^th anniversary of the Garden of The Gods 

and they celebrated with the opening of a new attraction inside the visitor center called the 

Parks Geo-Trekker Theater, with its four giant video screens in "better than HD" quality, and surround-sound audio system and lighting effects.  Visitors can watch screenings of the new 14-minute film, "How Did Those Red Rocks Get There?" 

This is going to be a paid event, but it was free today. Everyone files inside a circular seating area with everyone facing outward towards four

screens, each wall is showing the same thing.

Then the simulation starts and you have a pilot who takes you through time visiting the earth at various points in it's history to see how all the layers of the mountains are formed. Very good CGI effects showing molten lava, dinosaurs, including one that comes up to the “window” of the space ship and licks the window then sneezes booger goo all over the glass.  Heh

And of course all the rocks of Pikes Peak going through it's various stages of being out of water, underwater, covered with glaciers, in a desert, mountains, erosion, bigger mountains and finally Pikes peak today.

The park is Free to the public everyday and it is really beautiful with lots of pull outs to enjoy the views, parking, picnic areas and hiking trails. It only takes about 20 minutes to drive through, maybe ½ hour with photo stops. 

But you can park and hike around on the various trails too.

We were pulling the trailer and there weren't many unoccupied trailer spaces to park in, so we drove through with only two parking stops. Then we drove through again so that Daryl would be able to see the sights. Then after the visitor center we drove through again because we missed the exit, then we drove through one more time because we took the visitor center exit instead of the main entrance exit which meant we would have missed Balancing Rock.

 One of the most photographed and impressive natural anomalies. 

A Beautiful day for a beautiful place.