Bicycling Montana, Wyoming,
Colorado and New Mexico - 2006

Mesa Verde, CO

July 1, 2006

Today we got up early, ate a very light breakfast, and headed to Mesa Verde National Park. We arrived at the visitor center just at 8:00 AM. They now require you to get tour tickets to see the major ruins, so we got tickets to see the Long House ruins in the morning and the Cliff Palace ruins in the afternoon. We then bought some shack food to eat at lunch time and headed to the Long House parking lot. We took the tram ride to and from the site and had a great tour because our tour guide was a professor at the University of New Mexico teaching about the Pueblo Indians. The break the tour groups into about 60 people. We had an exceptional great tour.

Mesa Verde gets a lot of lighting strikes and as a result a large portion of the mesas are left with dead, burned trees. As we finished the tram ride, I took a picture of the burned areas.

When the tour of Long House ruins was complete we drove to the Mesa Verde Museum where we both had a free large slice of Mesa Verde birthday cake. They were celebrating Mesa Verde's 100th year as a National Park. On the way we stopped and took a picture of the distance valley from the top of the mesa.

We then continued on our way to the Cliff Palace ruins. We arrived early and had to wait in the sun for another great tour. We enjoyed the tour but maybe because we were tired or maybe because of our guide, either way we both preferred the Long House Tour.

Next we took a self guided tour of the Mesa Loop Road. This included visiting surface dwellings and views of cliff dwellings we even looked across the valley to a view of Cliff Palace which we had just finished touring.

Lightening and thunder started just as we were ready to leave the park, however, we stopped to watch the Hopi Indians perform a dance. If it was a rain dance it was successful. We drove over 60 miles inside the park, most of it on very steep curvy roads with 25 mile speed limits. We returned to Cortez around 6:00, very happy, tired and hungry.