Day 1...Mesa Verde - Cliff House

Friday June 5th was our first day in Mesa Verde National Park. We started off by going to the visitor center. It is a very long, curving road to get there. There are 3 ranger guided tours that you have to pay for. We decided to start our day off by going on one, to Cliff House. It is the largest dwelling in the park. We got to the parking lot and we were way early. We had to wait awhile before we could go on the tour, so we ate lunch first. We were all a little nervous to go on the tour; you just don't know what to expect. We could see a ladder going up a crack in the rock and we were told you had to go up that to get out! What!

CLIFF HOUSE

This was a picture John took while we were waiting to go down there.

This is Cliff house from an overlook across from it.

This is Eli our Park Ranger.

This is the kids sitting under the alcove waiting for our turn to go down in the ruins.

You went down a set of metal stairs then along the side of the mountain. Everything was really safe tell you got to where we had to sit under this alcove. There is just one part right here where you had to be careful. They really need a railing right there! Eli really is standing right on the edge. It is just so amazing how the Indians got in and out of there. They made toe and hand picks in the wall. Just little holes they would carve in the walls. They would balance jugs of water, bring food in and everything by scaling the side of a cliff! There is no way I was going to do that, but that is how they grew up. It was amazing to see the toe picks still in the walls. Most of the building, of these huge structures, was done between 1200ad to 1300ad. By 1300ad everyone had moved on. (Just a little history lesson for you) :)

It was very windy and overcast, great for hiking.

It was amazing to see how big this place really was. You could see black smoke covering the walls where they use to have fire. It was amazing to see the Kivas, and the other buildings. It really got your mind thinking about how these people lived and what drove them away. We could walk around some, but you couldn't really go into anything. We saw some open Kivas and got to poke are head into a large towering building. It had some drawings in it. You couldn't sit or stand on any walls and you had to be careful where you walked. It was just really neat seeing where these people lived. It was amazing how they built everything so long ago.

The picture below is of us hiking out of Cliff House. You had to go up some stones stairs and two tall ladders thru a crack in a cliff to get out. It looked really scary from up top, but once you got down there it really wasn't bad. No one had a hard time getting up or down. It really wasn't bad. It was really a rather easy hike.

The next thing we went and did was a self guild tour of Tree house. I have to many pictures to share, so I am going to make the rest of day one on another post. Tree house to come....