We woke up promptly at 7 to eat some pan fried granola, play with the neighbors, try to dry out the Chuck Box from its soaking during the dinner cooking from last night, and headed down the road an hour to get to the first cliff dwelling tour of the day: Cliff Palace.

Cliff Palace, Mesa Verde

Scott and I visited here around 1997.  At that time they allowed you to walk all around the dwellings at Cliff Palace.  They have since restricted where you can go to try to preserve the dwellings.

We chatted with this adorable family that took their family Christmas card picture here.  They were all wearing the same shirt, “Team Aldrich: Lifetime Member.”  The ranger told us that if you looked carefully you could see the small fingerprints from the women and children in the mortar in the walls.  We did see tiny fingerprints.  It was rather interesting connecting Brooke’s fingerprints to those left sometime between 1,200 – 1,300 AD.  Most of the signs around the park still call the people who lived in these dwellings the Anasazi people.  However Anasazi in Navajo means enemy of my people.  This description is thus offensive to the descendents of these people.  Consequently the former inhabitants are now referred to as the ancestral Puebolans.

The gathering spots in these cliff dwellings are called kivas.  The kivas were covered with wood boards and were entered through a hole in the wood roof and a ladder.  In the bottom of each kiva was a small hole called a sipapu.  This was the spirit entrance.

The next ranger guided tour we went on was at Balcony House.  Cody spotted some animal tracks in the sand near the water seep at the bottom of the rock.  The rock in the area is mostly sandstone, so it filters through the rock until it hits a harder rock layer (I think it was shale) and then the water seeps out.

This tour was a lot more physically demanding and came with a long safety talk before we started.  It included squeezing through cracks in walls, climbing up thirty-two foot ladders, and crawling through a confining twelve foot tunnel.  Scott wanted a picture of me before I had to squeeze through a crack in the wall.  Let’s just say I prefer wide open spaces.  I don’t mind elevators or large caves, but I let Scott do his shimming through small dark caves all on his own.  The balcony house had wood beams running through it to make ledges.  Again, it was wild to think how old the trees were and they were still mostly intact.

Brooke and Cody did a great job going up all the ladders that overlooked very steep canyon walls.

I wanted to be the last one through the twelve foot tunnel, so that I would have open space behind me.  The family waited patiently on a shady rock until I came out.  It wasn’t really that bad, you could stand up about halfway between for a step or two and I was able to see light out the ends the whole way.

Spruce House, Mesa Verde

This was the Spruce House.  It was a one mile round trip hike down and up some pretty steep terrain.

Brooke and Cody headed down into a kiva.  I started to go down to be a good mom, but three steps down the small, dark and very fresh air depleted room started to envelop me.  I quickly popped back up.  Scott laughed.  “No kiva for miva?”  My response. “Yeah. No.”  The kids pretended to grind corn, we took some more pictures and headed back up to the visitor’s center.  We learned that there are fifty-nine actual National Parks.  However, there are over four hundred National Park sites which includes monuments, recreational areas, and other lands.

Brooke and Cody dug into the snacks and watched the rain after we ran through an afternoon monsoon partway up from our hike down to the self-guided Spruce House tour.  Just a few minutes down the road there was no rain and we caught sight of some more cliff dwellings from the road.  The last cliff dwelling we saw had the tallest tower in the park at four stories.  The park was working very hard to reinforce the tower.  The park rangers were very careful to point out that they tried their best not to reconstruct the dwellings, but to reinforce, so that most of the dwellings are still original.   Of the 4,000 ruins in the park only six hundred are cliff dwellings.  We also viewed quite a few remnants of pit houses.

The picture of the van on the left is of Scott attempting to drive away after I popped out from a mobile photo shoot a few hundred feet in front of the van.  I put my thumb out to catch a ride, but he kept going…  The picture above and on the right is of a spider Scott spotted on a roadside sign.  It looks like it has a face on the back of it.  We have to figure out what kind it is.

After the Mesa Top Loop drive and quick peeks we headed back up to our campground. Scott decided he didn’t want to cook and clean up in the rain two days in a row.  So we stopped at a picnic vista part way to our evening home.  Except that the wind was blowing so hard that the roof did nothing to protect the poor picnickers before us who had the same idea.  They were rain whipped back into their van. After we sat there for a while hoping the rain would give up Scott came up with the idea to head back to the campground store.  Most campgrounds don’t have such a nice campground store and picnic area, but this one did.  We weren’t the only ones who had this idea.  We met campers from all over the place.  The campers we spoke with for the longest were from the Czech Republic.  The husband had been working at Yale as a statistician and biologist.  The wife was still mid school back at home.  They also had a little boy who turned one on the 29th.  Scott shared our leftover pork chops with them and they shared some Colorado spirits.  Shortly before we left Brooke exclaimed, “How weird!  It is sunny over there now and raining over there.”  I told her that means a rainbow is coming.  The couple behind me shared, “There already is a rainbow.  In fact a double rainbow.”

Somehow Scott got singing a Three Little Piggies song by Green Jelly while on the Loop back to camp and he had me search my phone for the song.  I didn’t find it, but I did find another of the family’s favorites “Light Up Your Lighter” .  It is a family favorite mostly because Scott is a pyromaniac and he has worked hard to create mini-pyros in our children.  After that song we just kept with a fire theme.  After I ran out of  fire songs we went with a rain theme since the afternoon monsoon was in full force.  We felt for the motorcyclists in front of us.

Just as we arrived to our campsite the sun came out.  Too bad I left open the vents in the top of the tent.  We had our own mini waterfalls in our tent while we were out.  Scott slept with Cody’s wet sleeping bag and everything else was…well, slightly squishy.  Cody asked me to snuggle and we were able to smile before we settled into a slightly squishy slumber.