This morning, Mike and I crawled out of the tent in the quiet of the dawn, tiptoed around camp making coffee and pancakes, and stood together in the silence, feeling the breeze, watching the clouds light up … a rare moment of peace and togetherness.
Then the kids woke up. And this morning, the “ants in their pants” were so bad that we had to strap them all into their car seats while we finished tearing down camp and strapping it all back onto the car. Back in Rangely, Grandma Beth and Papa Steve were amazed when they saw how much we had stuffed into our little Subaru Forester, but it turned out to be wise on our part to bring what we did. We were completely self-contained for our meals for almost five days, had everything we needed to pack out in the wild, and brought plenty of toys/books/dolls to keep the kids entertained.
We pulled out of Natural Bridges National Monument and headed south toward Four Corners, which I had warned Lord Herndon about, but since he had never been, we decided it would be worth it.
After standing in four states at once, we turned our car east and followed our circular track back into Colorado via Cortez, then drove down into Mesa Verde National Park. I hadn’t been there since I was a girl, but I remembered being able to run along the walls and venture into the many buildings and rooms. I knew that there had been several wildfires in the area in the meantime, and that some of the structures had been damaged, thus prompting the park security to limit access to the sites. I knew we wouldn’t be able to get the same kind of “hands on” experience that I remembered.
What I didn’t remember, though, was the spectacular drive into the park. We climbed plateaus and skirted around mesas in a dramatic landscape that made me think of UP. Along the way, we stopped at various remains of the dwelling places of the Ancestral Pueblo Indians, where they lived from A.D. 600 to A.D. 1300 before mysteriously disappearing. Mike teaches the history of Mesa Verde in school, so he was particularly interested to see it for himself. He told me as a explored that the Pueblo people would use these cliff dwellings as summer homes while they farmed the lush soil on the top of the mesas. Each site was a cluster of buildings housing a certain family group. They created ingenious structures with smoke vents, rainwater collection devices, and hair-raising ladder entrances.
Besides which, it gets cold in those mountains at night!
