Mississippi River Trip: Ancient Houses

On our way to MESA Verde we saw a forest fire start about 60 miles away from us on a ridge.  We got out to look and managed to spot a couple of firefighting planes dump their loads on the blaze – Larisa got some pictures of it.  We continue to bring fire wherever we go, apparently.

Mesa Verde was a surprise for Larisa.  Somehow I’d managed to forget it after all of my planning, but a good friend reminded me of it when we chatted by phone (Thanks Beat-Rice!)  I knew something like it would fascinate Larisa, so I kept it secret until e got there, never telling her the destination.  Good planning on my part – Larisa was suitably awed.

Mesa Verde is in Southern Colorado, a maze of washed out canyons and scrub brush, with pinyon pines and mixed desert foliage.  The real magic in Mesa Verde is in the canyons.  Ancient Pueblo Indians built thousands of rock dwellings along the cliff sides to live in and store grain.  The move from the Mesa plateaus were caused by a combination of the soil becoming exhausted from farming (Ancient Peublans hadn’t learned about crop rotation), lack of water, and simple survival.  As the crops dried up the fighting began, and there is even some suggestion that the food situation became difficult enough that cannibalism played an important symbolic and survival related role in the culture for many years.  After anywhere from 100-250 years after moving to the cliff sides, the Pueblans moved on to greener pastures, leaving the structures and a lot of artifacts behind.

We learned all of this from the excellent tour guide who took us down to the Palace.  I’ve been on a ton of tours, even in National Parks, and our guide was far and away the best I’d ever seen.  It was obvious that the culture and history of the area fascinated him, and he managed to pass that fascination along to a tour group of 40 people.  I didn’t count, but he probably answered more than 100 questions in the space of 90 minutes.  The Palace was beautiful in the dying light of early evening, and I probably brought home more information from that tour than I retained from all of the parks we’ve been to so far. 

 

By the end of the tour a rain storm had moved in, and we were racing up the ladders and stairs to get back to the parking lot.  I remember thinking to myself that I should bring the rain gear, but decided against it.  There’s a drought, I told myself!  The rain wasn’t heavy enough to get to the cameras in the packs, so that was a blessing, but it was cold!  In the car Larisa and I dried off and decided to take the loop drive – after all it was light out and the storm seemed to be playing itself out.  What a decision!

 As we rounded the western part of the loop we saw a double rainbow – two completerainbows right next to each other, stretching from horizon to horizon!  I’ve rarely seen a complete rainbow, and never seen a double like that.  This may surprise you, but Larisa and I took several hundred pictures of it.  We then used the dying light to shoot several more pictures of the ruins along the cliff walls, a field of burned out trees (fun fact:  in the last forty years more than 70% of Mesa Verde has burned), and headed back to camp for our first showers in 6 days.  We stopped to eat at the shower area because the campsite at Mesa Verde has a momma bear and two cubs living in it.  We didn’t see it, but Larisa was in a tuna fish mood, so we didn’t want to risk seeing them hungry.