A Sacred Place
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| Original Mesa Verde National Park Main Entrance Road Sign |
After four glorious days exploring Zion National Park, our next target on our Fall 2023 National Park road trip was Mesa Verde. From Springdale, Utah, we headed west to go south on 59 into Arizona. Crossing into northern Arizona, the time zone changes and the highway changes to 389. Highway 389 meanders east and then northeast back into southern Utah, changes to highway 89 and we were back in the Mountain Time Zone. After another hour or so of traveling mostly east, we headed southeast back into Arizona, and yep another time zone change.
We targeted Four Corners, a place I think I had been before as a child, but Tim had never been. After paying our $8 per person entry fee managed by Navajo Nation Parks & Recreation, we made our way through the dirt parking lot, found a parking spot and walked to the actual Four Corners 'monument', a slab of cement marking the intersection of four states: Colorado, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico. Stood in line to take our selfie, bought a small trinket from one of the vendors, and made our way to Cortez, CO.
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| Four Corners Monument |
Making our way northeast from Four Corners, we landed at the Sundance RV Park right off Main Street in Cortez, CO. We were able to walk from their to the Main St. Brewery.
Mesa Verde National Park
Mesa Verde National Park, established in 1906 has about 500,000 visitors annually ranking it 40th out of the 63 National Parks. The park has undergone a ton of infrastructure work, including a new Visitor Center, and almost all of the roads are new. That's a lot of asphalt considering it's an hour drive from the visitor center to the Cliff Palace. They're still working on some of the signage, and many of the signs are from the 20's and written in art deco fonts and very difficult to read. Along with the museum renovation they also recently released an educational video that redacts some of the questions about 'where did these people go' as if they just disappeared. Changing it into more of a statement about how they felt their time in this area was done (they were here over 700 years), and they moved on. "Ancient DNA used to track the mass exodus of ancestral Pueblo people from Colorado's Mesa Verde region in the late 13th century indicates many wound up in the northern Rio Grande area north of Santa Fe, New Mexico, inhabited today by the Tewa Pueblo people." Here's that video: Footprints of Our Ancestors.
As you make your way into the park and towards the cliff dwellings, you pass several overlooks, including the Montezuma Valley Overlook where on a clear day you can see for hundreds of miles, shown in the first few images below. We then made our way to the Spruce Tree House and eventually the Cliff Palace Overlook. When we asked about the National Park sign for our selfie, the Park Ranger said it was still under construction, and he told us of the secret location of the original entrance sign - that's the image at the top of this post.
Canyon of the Ancients
Canyon of the Ancients National Monument is home to thousands of Native American archaeological sites. As of 2022 they had discovered over 8,500 sites. On our 7.5 mile hike we saw about a dozen, so difficult to imagine how many more are out there. We did the Sand Canyon hike, which had other amazing scenery and we were the only ones on the trail until we came across the horse rider near the end.
It was appropriate that we visited on a Sunday, as it is kind of a spiritual experience, an extension of the ambiance I felt at Mesa Verde. Not as many details about the ruins available at this park, just a basic map with about 1/3 of the pueblos we saw actually noted on the map. All I can say is they had quite the view!
We followed up our hike with a stop at WildEdge Brewery Collective. We enjoyed our time in the Cortez area, and looked forward to our last stop on our three week trip, Great Sand Dunes in Alamosa, CO.
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