Visting Mesa Verde 2008

The Autumn Road-Trip Weekend Season Begins

9/21/08 - Mesa Verde, CO, Four Corners CO/NM/UT/AZ, and Canyon de Chelly, AZ

An overnight trip to four states and another nation

This time of year is a beautiful time to travel in the Southwest (but as we always say, where isn't it?). So we decided we are going to take full advantage of our weekends this Fall and see some of our local (well, within a 6-hour drive) sites that we've been meaning to check out. First was a trip up to southwest Colorado to Mesa Verde National Park. Leaving Albuquerque at 6am, we took a beautiful 4-hour drive up Hwy 550 through Durango, CO to the park. We passed through the entrance station and took a winding but beautiful drive up to the top of the mesa, where the primary sites and our lodging for the night were located. Mesa Verde is primarily known for its ruins. Ancient ancestors of the current Southwest Pueblo tribes built pit houses (~600 A.D.) and more sophisticated cliff dwellings (1000 - 1200 A.D.) in this region, and many of the ruins are still in quite good condition. We took a couple of very interesting tours (you're only able to visit the good stuff via tour), saw a huge bear, and logged a lot of mesa-top miles on the minivan before topping the day off with a nice evening of drinks and dinner back at the Farview Lodge. As is often the case during our travels in the National Parks, there were as many Europeans as Americans there (nearly all French, German, and English - in that order), which always makes us think that there must be many Americans missing out on some of this country's 'greatest hits' (the best of America's landscape, history, ecology, geology, etc.). Guess that means more room for us.

Sunday morning we woke up and decided to take a different route home. We first headed for the nearby landmark known as The Four Corners, the only place in the country where four states meet (Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico), ironically located in the Navajo Nation, lending one more jurisdiction to anyone sitting in the middle of the landmark owned and operated by the Navajo tribe. From there we headed south through Arizona to Canyon de Chelly National Monument. This beautiful red rock canyon has a number of breathtaking lookouts, one short but fantastic hike down to the green canyon floor, and several guided jeep/horse/hiking tours that can be arranged through a Navajo guide. The national monument is actually a joint venture between the U.S. government and the Navajo Nation, the latter controlling much of the access below the rim. We saw enough to know we'd like to come back and make some arrangements to explore more of the canyon.

Pottery demonstration