Day 11 – Hovenweep National Monument, UT to Four Corners, AZ/UT/CO/NM to Mesa Verde National Park, CO

Miles driven today: 144 Cumulative miles: 2564 We woke up at 6:30am from the best night of sleep we’ve had on the trip. Aside from about 10 to 15 minutes of wind just before we fell asleep, the campground was very quiet and peaceful. I guess that can be expected when only five sites out of 30 are occupied (including the camp host). Daniel cooked breakfast while I took down camp and unpacked and repacked the car. I discovered that Daniel lost a shoe sometime yesterday. We’re pretty sure it rolled under the car when he changed into flip flops at Double Arch. We are blaming the heat for him not remembering to pick it up. Ironic that earlier that day he was telling me how much he liked those shoes. Anyway, we drove less than a quarter mile to the Visitor Center at 9:00am where our camp host was also working the counter. He was very helpful and let us know what to see and do in the area. Hovenweep is an area that contains Puebloan ruins. The area we were in contains 11 sites in a canyon fed by a spring. The ruins we could see were all from structures built 800 years ago. The fat that these structures are still standing at all is a testament to the abilities of the Puebloans. The only rebuilding of any kind that has been done is for structural integrity and is barely noticeable. We took the one and a half mile loop trail around the canyon to see the ruins at the Hovenweep site. It took about an hour and a half and the heat was bearable as it was only 11:30am by the time we finished. There are other sites with ruins as well, but these are less accessible. Overall, I would say the campground and Visitor Center and facilities at Hovenweep National Monument were the nicest, cleanest, and most organized we have seen. This may be partially due to the remoteness and the small quantity of visitors to the Monument. The drive out of Hovenweep was much nicer than the drive in – being able to see more than 20-feet helps with that. The surrounding area was mostly fields as we suspected. We drove for about an hour until we reached Four Corners. This is the site where Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah all meet at one point. There is a platform with a plaque and a place where you can stand in all four states at once to have your picture taken. That’s about all there is to it – just a chance to say ‘been there, done that.’ There are plenty of Navajo booths lining the parking lot selling mostly jewelry. So, if that’s your sort of thing, then you could easily spend an hour or more perusing there. We continued driving into Colorado and made it to Mesa Verde National Park around 2:30pm and went to the General Store to check in for camping. We were given a pass to go pick out a campsite. We drove by nearly all 395 sites (no, that’s not an exaggeration). We finally settled on a spot away from other tents and RVs, close to a bathroom (which we later figured out was out of order), and just a short walk to the showers and General Store. We went back to the store to officially check in, went back to camp to set up, then drove ten plus miles further into the park to go to the Visitor Center. There, we bought tour tickets for Cliff Palace and Balcony House. A ranger told us that Long House and Weatherill Mesa were now closed for the rest of the season (apparently Labor Day is the last day for these). No biggie as I’m sure we’ll make it down here for another visit in the future. The tour we chose for Cliff Palace started at 5:00pm, so we made the short drive to meet our ranger for the tour. Our ranger was a bit crabby (at one point early in the tour, she asked me “Did he just drag you on this trip and you are bored to death?” Um, no. “I’m just taking it all in and am a quiet person with nothing to say right now,” I told her.). We’ll just attribute her crabbiness to this being her last tour and last day in the park before heading elsewhere – we think she was having some emotional issues. Cliff Palace is a massive 150-room structure (probably the most recognized at Mesa Verde) set into an alcove high in the canyon, 120-feet below the mesa top. The cliff dwellings in the park date back to the 1200s and are mostly original. Some reconstructions or modifications have been made for the purpose of structural integrity only. Numerous kivas (underground ceremonial rooms), each with a fire pit and a sipapu (a hole in the floor that is a spiritual passage from the fourth world – the one in which we currently live – to the third world – the one from which the Pueblo believe we came). The sipapu is as important to the Puebloan culture as the cross is to Christians. For being 800 years old, the structures are amazingly well preserved. The natural alcoves in which the cliff dwellings were built provide protection from the elements, helping to prevent rapid deterioration. Archeologists have used numerous dating techniques to determine the age of sites, including dendrochronology (a dating method in which tree rings from multiple trees in the same vicinity are compared to determine the age of a tree) on the pieces of wood found as floors, balconies, support, or roofs in the otherwise stone and mortar cliff dwellings. Based on the dendrochronology, which also shows climate changes, they believe that the ancestral Puebloans only stayed in these dwellings for about 75 to 100 years (though they were in this area for hundreds of years prior in pithouses and other structures on the mesas above the canyons) and may have left due to years of drought and, consequently, failing crops. We also learned that numerous wildfires, caused by lightning strikes mostly, have burned 80% of the park’s acreage in its 101 year history as a national park. The most recent fires in 2000, 2002, and 2003 burned over 50% of the park, decimated 600 year old Piñon Pine and Juniper Forests (the oldest in the nation – charred remains are what is visible now throughout most of the park), but also revealed 600 plus mesa top sites that they didn’t know existed previously. The tour wrapped up about 6:00pm just as it was beginning to rain. We got caught in a downpour on the way back to camp. By the time we got there, it had let up enough to cook and eat dinner. It was a bit cold and was sprinkling off and on, so we spent most of the evening in the car reading and writing until moving to the tent to play games before we went to sleep. Wildlife seen: mule deer, owl, magpies, golden eagle, tanager Miles hiked: ~2.0