12th & 13th August.
We left Albuquerque and headed back to Colorado. The high road into Taos was lush and green, the road out back turned dry and harsh.
There was little in between. No towns, no gas stations. Just a long straight road through red dirt. Well, there was a small casino along the way. Sticking out in the middle of nowhere. What dusty traveller would wander in there?
I thought I might have a peek inside, but the thought of the long drive we still have yet to complete prevented me from stopping. I needed to get to Mesa Verde before 5pm to book a free tour for the next day.
The desert landscape became a little monotonous until we hit Colorado again. The drive from Durango to Cortez, past the Mesa Verde National Park, was beautiful.
We headed to Mesa Verde National Park to book a tour with the National Park Service for one of the tours to explore cave dwellings created by the Puebloans.
Then, it was off to explore the various kivas and how they kept warm and air circulating from kiva to kiva as their communities developed.
We also found views of the cliff dwellings driving atop the mesa. This gave us a sense of scale of what we would visit the next day.
Why these people decided to plant on top and live in these cliff dwellings and climb up and down steep walls is a guess.
Can you spot the people leaving the Cliff Palace in the photo above? We’d be doing exactly that the next day.
Another tour group ahead of us listens to their guide as they look into a kiva.
The photo above shows the innards of a kiva. The hole in the middle is where the fire burns. There’s a flat slab right near the fire hole, if you can see. Behind that slab is a hole – not seen in this photo – that deflects the fire and regulates the temperature as warm air moves from room to room. Well, at least that’s what I understood of the kiva.
There are a lot of warnings about climbing up and down the cliff dwellings, but it wasn’t hard at all.
After the morning tour, we headed off for Montrose.