JUNE 14-15, 2007 "On To Mesa Verde"

THURSDAY. This is the second time through for this post. Blogger facilitated my accidental deletion of a couple hours work! I was so disgusted that it's taken me two months or so to get back to doing it again. Since then, we've already done another 5-week trip and attended a Caravan at Anza Borrego. More on both later (probably much later). Anyway, good-bye to Telluride as we head south and, again, up, up, up. This is glorious country that looks just like every ad for Colorado that you've seen. Green slopes covered with healthy trees, snow-capped peaks, endless vistas. We topped out our climb at 10,240 feet at Lizard Head Pass. From here, at last, it's pretty much of a downhill roll through picture-perfect ranches with free-range beef. Now, with those views, these cows are happy! Seeing lots of motorcycles today, including one clown who overtook me, passed over a double yellow on a blind hill curve, and had to ccareen right in front of me to avoid being bug splat on the oncoming truck. His traveling buddies all dropped back behind Albatross until it's really safe to go by. We hit Cortez at last, and turned east towards the park entrance down the road. At the entrance, we flash our interagency pass, collect our brochures, and start . . to . . . climb. The campground is up about four miles, and is fairly bleak. Plus, AAA's camping guidebook is misleading. The wording made it seem like there were several hundred sites with hookups. Wrong. Several hundred, yes, but only 15 with hookups, and all of them long since reserved. Virtually everything else is deserted. We took off to survey the potential sites, picked a likely suspect based on anticipated afternoon shade (shadow eyeball method), then drove back to the registration center4 to lay claim. Decided to go see the sites before settling in. This is a weird park. The visitor center is 10 miles further in on a winding and climbing road, and the actual ruins are another 6 to 10 miles further still. All in all, it's a long slow drive to the goods. We signed up at the visitor center for a tour of Cliff Palaces for later today, and Balcony house tomorrow a.m. You can't view any ruin without a ranger accompanying., but you can get into Spruce Tree Lodge w/o a reservation, so did that first. All of these are nifty in the sense of awe that people actually took the effort to live in such inaccessible places, and their skill in crafting stone buildings that have sttod for over 700 years. Why they bothered is still a mystery, as there is no evidence of any violence or warfare in the area. We shot lots of pics and asked the rangers tons of questions. The museum at Spruce Tree is excellent, if this is your thing. Spruce Tree had easy access, and was overrun with tourists (where are they staying? Not at the campground!) like us. Cliff Palace is more difficult to reach, and the climb out is by a couple of ladders almost straight up the face of the cliff. I'm amazed that hundreds of thousands of people do this each year. Cliff Palace was huge, with 23 ceremonial kivas and over 100 rooms. Most interesting factoid was that the entire population suffered from emphysema from living in small enclosed spaces with fires buring in the center pits. Back to the campground and our "shady" site. So much for the shadow eyeball method of predicting the sun's path. No shade, worse, after 20 minutes of wasted gas and a steam of my best Navy invective, we gave up trying to get level at this spot. Tried an adjacent site and it was much easier. Once in, I wasn't going to move the rig, so I unloaded my bike to pedal back to the reservation center to tell them of the change. Biking at 7,880 feet is a woofer going uphill! The reso center is in the same room as a small store. The leveling frustration requires a bit of the grape to smooth out the psyche, so I perused the extensive selection of 5 reds and 5 whites that were available, all of them associated with the Rutherford Winery, even the New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc that was imported by said Rutherford. Plopped it in my basket and gave it a thorough mixing on the trip back to the rig. Loni made a yummy stir fry of chicken, potatoes, carrots, and other goodies, with Ghiardelli chocolate for desert. We killed the bottle with a stroll around our loop to watch the first really red sunset of the trip. Finished off my re-read of A.C. Clarke's "City & The Stars" and once again realized that some things go better with youth. Ended the night with the penultimate episode of Ballykissangel. Good series. We'll be sorry to see it end.
We're still new enough at this rv-ing that we have this inexplicable delight at being parked in the middle of nowhere, without hookups, yet still watching dvd's with all the comforts of home.

FRIDAY Much warmer night last night. The coach interior was at 62 degrees, substantially higher than the 49 at Gunnison. At our usual and were on our way at 8:00 to our 9:20 tour. As we passed the dump station on the way out of the camp, something looked mighty familiar about the rig and the gent who was dumping tanks. YES! It was the internet-blog-famous "Tioga and George!" George is perhaps the most-viewed rv-oriented blogger on the internet, and I've followed his adventures for about a year and a half. Never thought we would cross paths. I hit the brakes and we backed up next to his rig to chat. He's amazingly the same in person as he appears through his blog. We took mutual pictures together, and had him in to see the rig. He thinks LD is the best on the market and worth 50k more than they charge. Whoa, slow down, George, don't give the factory any bad ideas. We complimented him on his rig's new paint job, which we followed being applied down in Mexico. Some serendipity. As George would say, "Wow!" Rest of the day was anticlimatic -- just another 700 year-old ruin. Actually, Balcony House was pretty neat as both the entry to it and the exit were done by long ladders, stair-steps with chains, a narrow passageway, and a hands-and-knees crawl through a small tunnel. Claustrophobia, anyone? Acrophobia, anyone? You get it all at Balcony House. Finished the tour, and headed back to the camp for showers and laundry, with a lunch stop first at a terrific turnout called Montezuma Overlook. Despite the name, lunch stayed with us. Started "Great American Short Stories" edited by Wallace Stegner (1957), one of the 50cents paperbacks we bought from the library at Moab. Finished the laundry and motored back to the unshady-but-reasonably-level site for journal writing and watching the newcomers in the space next to us try to level their rigs. Entertainment is where you find it.