On Wednesday, I took a day trip from Durango to Mesa Verde National Park. Mesa Verde is known for its Ancestral Pueblo cliff dwellings and it’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site in addition to being a national park. There are hikes you can do, but the best thing to do there is tour the cliff dwellings. I did the tours for Cliff Palace and Balcony House, which are very close to each other. Long House, the third one you can tour, is an hour away and I didn’t have time for all 3.

I got to the park at around 9 am and the Cliff Palace tour wasn’t until 10:30 am, so I stopped at all the viewpoints on the Cliff Palace Loop. Most of them are overlooks where you can see various cliff dwellings. The last one requires a 1 mi hike to the overlook for Balcony House and Soda Canyon. When I got to the trailhead, it was almost time to head to my tour. I had a few minutes less than I actually needed for the hike, but I decided that I could power walk through it and be ok. I power walked and towards the end, ran a little when I realized I was actually late. I did manage to see the overlooks for 2 seconds each and I arrived at the tour in time to hear the safety instructions. However, while I was power walking / running, I started feeling my left knee. Throughout the rest of the day, my knee was fine, but put a pin in the fact that I was feeling it on the hike. We’ll revisit it in the next blog post.

Cliff Palace is the largest cliff dwelling in North America. It was impressive to see structures that were built 700-800 years ago. What was more impressive, was thinking about how the Pueblo people got to the dwellings. There are now stairs to go down to the dwellings, but they didn’t have those back then. Our tour guide told us that when conditions in the area changed, the Pueblo people left the cliff dwellings and migrated south. Their descendants now live in Taos, New Mexico. It was really cool to hear that because I’m going to Taos in a few days. It’ll be a lot more interesting to see the Taos Pueblo now that I’ve seen where their ancestors lived 700 years ago.

After the tour, I stopped to buy some fry bread. The reservation of the Ute people borders Mesa Verde. You can cross over to their land from the Cliff Palace Loop and there’s usually someone selling traditional fry bread there. The fry bread dough is flattened into a thin circle and then fried. You can eat it with different toppings. I had half with salt and honey and half with cinnamon and sugar. They also had a garlic option. It was delicious, obviously. There’s no way that fried bread won’t taste good.

Once I had finished my bread, I drove through the Mesa Top Loop. There are lots of stops along the loop where you can see the history of the Pueblo dwellings. Pithouses were the first dwellings. They would make a shallow depression in the ground, build walls and a roof with wood, and then seal it with adobe. After every rain season, they’d have to re-seal it. Later, they started using sandstone blocks to construct homes, and eventually, they built the multi-story cliff dwellings.

When I finished the loop, I went to my Balcony House tour. This tour is a little more adventurous. You have to go up multiple ladders, including a 32 foot one. And you have to crawl through a tunnel that’s 18” wide and 26” tall. I didn’t have a problem with the tunnel, but bigger people had to drag themselves sideways to fit through it.

Some of you have heard of my friend St Medard. He’s the patron saint of weather and he changes the weather for me all the time. It was supposed to rain on Wednesday afternoon and I had asked him to hold the rain until I was driving back to Durango. During the Balcony House tour, it sprinkled for a few minutes, but that was it. After the tour, I stopped to see one more dwelling and then I went to the gift shop to buy my magnet and pin. When I was about to get back into my car to head home it started raining for real. When I got to Durango, it wasn’t raining there anymore, so I never got wet. Once again, St Medard came through for me. He’s the best.