Mesa Verde National Park.

After six nights at one of the best Forest Service campgrounds in the country, it was time to move. Even though it was only a one-hour drive, it was all downhill. We went over Lizard Head pass at 10,222 feet in elevation, and landed in Dolores, Colorado at less than 7,000 feet. We exchanged our mountains and tall pines for desert sand and sage brush. To get there, we crossed the Dolores River. We had hoped to kayak here, but the continuing drought in Colorado has turned parts of the river into a rock garden. So we turned our minds from cool water activities to hot hiking activities.

We are staying at Circle C RV Park, another Passport America park that honors the half-price rate during the week. The main reason we are here is that it is just 16 miles from a national park we have never visited--Mesa Verde. It's home to some of the best preserved pueblo dwellings in the United States.

We soon found that even after arriving at the entry point of Mesa Verde National Park, we still had a lot of driving to do. It was a 45 minute drive up winding roads to get to some of the first stops inside the park at the "Far View Sites."

These were actually some of the most fun sites of the day because we could actually walk into rooms and look down into the kivas where people lived and walked 800 years ago.

At other locations, a chain fence kept us on the edge. But we were still able to peek inside what life might have been for the ancestral pueblo people that built rock homes here on the top of this green mesa at Mesa Verde National Park.

This group of native Americans was settling down from a nomadic existence, and began raising crops and living in permanent structures. In their busy schedule of making everything they needed to survive, at least one resident had time to do a little ornamental carving on this residence.

After our drive up the mesa, we headed down Chapin Mesa Road to get a view of the canyon. It was here that the ancients found out that the alcoves at the top of these canyons provided a roof and part of the walls needed to build a shelter. During the 1200s they left their homes built on top of the mesa, and started building in the canyon walls.

If we zoom in on those canyon walls, we can see the stacked stones that were neatly fitted under the rock ledges. Most of the structures we will see today have been fortified and preserved, but they are in remarkable shape considering that they were built 800 years ago, and then mysteriously abandoned 100 years later.

Over and over, we saw the ruins left behind by families that lived in this canyon in the 1200's. 

The most famous of all the cliff dwellings in this canyon is the Cliff Palace. But the observation platform is the closest we can get to the palace this summer.

Normally, visitors to the park can reserve a ranger-led tour that would take them on a hike across the canyon and right into this village that includes more than 150 rooms. But Covid has changed the national park experience at many of the best parks in our country.

Likewise, on the other-facing wall of the canyon we can barely see the Balcony House tucked under that arched opening at the top of the wall.

A reservation ticket can usually be purchased to tour the Balcony House. That tour includes climbing the 32-foot ladder that takes visitors into the house to walk where the ancients walked. These tours put you right into the ruins, and they are guided by an expert that can explain everything you would be seeing. We're sorry that we are missing that opportunity this summer.

We continued our drive around the Mesa Top Loop, stopping at each of the view points, and taking the obligatory pictures.

Most of the pictures were taken with a zoom lens across a canyon opening. It was a little like hunting Easter eggs to find the rubble that was hiding in the nooks and crannies of the canyon walls. Within this large national park, there are 4,500 archaeological sites. It seemed like we saw a lot, but we obviously saw just the tip of the iceberg here.

We were tired after our tour of everything that was open this summer. Because of the Covid changes, much of the park is closed. That includes the visitor center, the archaeological museum, and the entire half of the park located down Wetherill Mesa Road. More importantly, the guided tours into the four best ruins have been cancelled since spring. 

We obviously could return and have another full day of touring to all the sites that were closed to us today. We'll have to do that some cool spring or fall day. But on this summer day we saw all that our temperature gauges wanted to see.

So we headed back to our campground at Circle C, for a delightful sunset in the desert. We can tell that some of the smoke from the forest fires in Northern Colorado have slipped down south, as that red sun sunk into the sage brush. It has been another great day of wandering God's wonders even when parts of it were closed this summer.