Mesa Verde

Continuing with our Southwestern Indigenous Tribes theme, we recently visited Mesa Verde National Park. We have been reading a fictional mystery book set at this park, which added to the fun of exploring the park. Mesa Verde is another park that you have to drive through some pretty mountain roads through. Patsy drove the van again this time because we were clued into this fact. She is doing better and better with these mountain roads, but still feels uneasy about taking Howard on too many hairpin turns.

I visited Mesa Verde as a kid with my family, but it was the first visit for the rest of our clan. It is one of those places every kid should see. I wonder how much longer the National Park Service is going to let people explore in these old ruins? I say take advantage of the opportunity while it still exists!

We explored two of the cliff dwellings that were originally built by ancestral Pueblan people nearly 900 years ago! The first sit we visited was Cliff Palace which is a ranger-led walk with a ranger talking way over the head of four and five year olds. The boys did pretty good considering the tour was an hour and the ranger talked the whole time. They did enjoy looking around the ruins and walking up steep stone stairways and climbing wooden ladders to descend to and ascend from the site.

Then we went to Spruce Tree House where the exploring was more free range. The best part of this site for our kids was climbing down inside a Kiva, sort of an underground gathering center for the ancient Native Americas who built them. We also did the the junior ranger program here. Chase was amazed that yet again we visited another place where the Indian children did not wear clothes in the pictures!

We saw a bit of wildlife here including some wild horses, wild turkey, mule deer, turkey vultures, canyon wrens, Stellar Jays, a rock squirrel and the ever present ravens.