Mesa Verde Part Two (Saturday Aug 12, 2017)

Durango, Colorado

This morning we had tickets for a 9:30 am tour of Balcony House. We got up early, we ate cold cereal, I even put dinner in our borrowed crockpot in our borrowed kitchen. We were out of here, fed, showered, and with packed lunches in hand, by 7:45 am, and that is a huge feat for this family. One of the reasons homeschool works so well for us is that we do not have to pull off this same performance five days a week, 9 months out of the year.

Climbing back out of Balcony House

The Balcony house tour promised to have us climbing a thirty foot high ladder and crawling through a tunnel that was only 18 inches wide. I actually got out my tape measure this morning to verify that my hips were less than 18 inches wide. I had a nightmare about this stupid tunnel last night. Standing at the trail head as our tour gathered I was comparing myself to others hoping at least a few of them fell into the category of "more likely to get stuck in the tunnel than me." I made it. It wasn't even close actually, it is narrow to get into the tunnel and narrow to get out, but I was never in any real danger of blocking the whole thing up and leaving everyone behind me in line stranded with no way out of the dwelling. Whew. Information presented at this tour was mostly the same as at Cliff Palace, but the tour itself was more fun. We climbed multiple ladders and crawled through two tunnels, we were actually inside the ruins and saw the springs that once provided water to the inhabitants. And this time we climbed out along the actual toe-holds (enlarged and with handrails added) that the inhabitants would have used themselves.

We only had one more thing to see on this side of the park, the Chapin Mesa Museum, so we stopped there on our way to Wetherill Mesa. Generally speaking we have steered clear of most of the visitor center stuff at the national parks, but we made exceptions for this museum and the peek into the research center at the park's entrance, which we looked at yesterday when we got our tour tickets. Because who doesn't want a glimpse of all the artifacts that have been dug up around these canyons?

Then we were on to Wetherill mesa on the other end of the park, where we saw Step House, did our Long house tour, visited the Badger House Community, oh, and ate lunch. And saw a rattlesnake. And wild horses. For reals, just like Man from Snowy River. Wetherill Mesa also featured the first flushing toilets we had seen since the entrance, so that was nice. There is one parking lot for all of this, so we parked and walked from one thing to the next. The tour at Long House was probably our best tour yet, though it did not involve as much adventure as Balcony House, we climbed a total of one ladder and there were no tunnels whatsoever. But the tour itself was more in depth and the ruins were immense. The ranger guide showed us petroglyphs on the walls right within the ruins, pottery shards in the fire pit, suspected 'cowboy holes,' where looters in the past broke through walls, and was able to describe many aspects of the daily lives of the Pueblo people who once lived here in much more detail than the other tour guides did. He wasn't exactly humble about that either, mentioning that there were a few rangers there who knew their stuff, presumably to include himself, haha.

Long House

My favorite random fact from Mesa Verde (as related by our Long House tour ranger guide): that there were 180 cacao jars found in the whole southwest region and that 166 of those jars were all in one storeroom in Chaco canyon. Whoever owned that storeroom, I feel a deep bond with them.