Mesa Verde

We now begin what could be called the Ancient Cliff Dwelling section of the road trip. Apparently many tribes throughout the American southwest all started building these awesome cliff dwellings around the year 1200. They were all abandoned for mysterious reasons about 200 years later. 

The first stop was Mesa Verde. There are 3 tours available there that take you to the best preserved pueblos, although there are as many as 600 dwellings throughout the park. We chose Balcony house, which is the "adventurous" option. The tour includes climbing a 32-foot ladder and crawling through a 12-foot tunnel. The tunnel was the only way in or out of the settlement back in the day. Those people must have been fit! The doors are so small that even exiting your room required some athletic exertion. It is crazy imagining how much effort it would have taken to haul a deer up or down the cliff face to take it back home. 

Stock photo of Balcony House from across the canyon

This was definitely not a kid friendly adventure, so we took turns watching the kids.

A Kiva. I still don't understand the purpose of these rooms despite the tour guide's explanation and several informational signs. 

Balcony House has 40 rooms, which makes it a medium size cliff dwelling for the region.

The balcony! This was a 2 story building. You could walk along the balcony to reach the upper rooms. 

A window from one plaza to the other. One plaza had nothing to stop you from falling off the edge of the cliff. The other had a small wall on the edge. Apparently this was the "nursery" where babies could crawl. This terrified me, but the tour guide said that they have found shockingly few human remains that died from falling off the cliffs. They dumped all sorts of trash over the edge, but the people who lived here learned to be sure footed.  

One advantage of living under the overhang is that water percolates through the porous sandstone, then seeps out in a little pool when it hits a layer of hard rock. The result was that they had a little water alcove right in the settlement!

Kiva selfie

The tunnel exit.
Apparently Balcony House is notorious for all the butts that end up being photographed on the ladder and tunnel. 

One other cool thing that happened at Mesa Verde is that we ran into Clarice Bird from the stake at our campground! She and her husband are retired. They decided to spend the summer travelling across the country with a canoe that they strap to the top of their SUV. They have a motorcycle in a cargo carrier on the back of the SUV that they drop off at the end point on the river, then drive to the start point to unload the canoe. When they finish their trip, Brother Bird jumps on the motorcycle to go get the car. Genius! Aaron and I were very inspired by this retirement plan, except we fully plan on having a self driving camper van. We'll take our time road tripping between all our kids to visit them and see lots of sites on the way. We will be very disappointed if self driving RVs still don't exist in 30 years.