Mesa Verde, CO to Albuquerque, NM
Arriving at Mesa Verde National Park was exciting, but I wasn’t prepared to be so blown away by the past. This park, unlike most National Parks, is not so much a nature park; driving to the site takes an hour through a windy prairie flat between canyons (hence Green Table for its name) with shrubs and a few pinyon trees. But the second you step down to get under the cliffs, you are transported to another time, the Classic period years 1100-1300 to be exact. What a joy to explore such ancient ruins that are so very well preserved. We decided to take the ranger tour of Cliff Palace, the largest site of remains in the area. They predict over a hundred people once lived and stored their food in the kivas, rooms, and towers built into the cliff. The Ancestral Puebloans were farmers, their fields grew on top the Mesa, above their cliff dwellings. They were also climbers, etching hand and foot holds into the sheer cliffs to reach their crops everyday. We got to climb a series of ten foot long ladders to get in and out. It was quite unreal walking throughout a village with hand shaped rocks for bricks and dried sand water mortaring the walls to stand so perfectly straight you could put a level to it! Three story tall towers reaching up and single story round rooms (kivas) dug deep into the base of the cave. Evidence of soot lined walls and ceilings of rooms where fire was their heat and cooking source. Tiny crawl spaces led back to rooms of storage for winter months. It was amazing feeling and imagining the space alive with its everyday hum to survive. In the Mesa Verde area there are several known cliff dwellings and Cliff Palace is thought to be a gathering place for all groups, a place to store extra crops and resources to be divvied out during winter or long droughts that sometimes lasted years. Either way, the lack of evidence of war or fighting and the intense evidence of a strong community based life has reassured my faith in humanity. What a true treat to enter a past that has been diagnosed by historians and archeologists but still holds its mystery for there is no written documentation for what life was like, all we know we know from the trees. Back on the road in Robin we headed to “four corners”, arrived precisely a half hour late, apparently it is an actual place owned by the Navajo tribe, and they close their gates at 7. Here we were imagining two invisible lines crossing with a sign stuck in the middle reading Four Corners. Oh well, so much for being in four places at once. We got back on the highway New Mexico bound. Cruised at night toward Albuquerque and saw the most magnificent shooting star, it’s tail lasted for many seconds before it burnt out, brilliant! Landed in Bernalillo, a suburb of the main city to sleep for the night.
