From the Porters' house, we drove down to Mesa Verda located in the southwest corner of Colorado. They had just opened the park back up, but there were still some COVID-19 restrictions that were in place. We did a combination of tent camping and hammocks for two nights.
We had a really beautiful drive on the way down through the Colorado mountains.
We arrived in the early afternoon and tried to quickly get our site all set up. They did have showers there, which was nice; however, we were not allowed to have fires. So we had to improvise and cook our food in the microwave at the visitor's center. Rebecca did an amazing job at cooking the microwaved salmon that she and I ate.
We were able to do one hike that evening to see some of the ancient dwellings. These ones were not on the cliffs, but they were nice because we could walk into many of them and explore them a little more.
A lot of the rooms were dug into the ground and it was fun imagining what life might have been like for them.
The next day we woke up early and drove to some of the cliff dwellings. Unfortunately, due to COVID-19, we couldn't go into any of these. But they were still impressive looking at them from afar. I don't think the pictures do them justice. These buildings were carved right into the cliffs and I guess the inhabitants climbed over the edge and lowered themselves down with ladders and ropes and stuff.
I thought this one was the most impressive. The picture doesn't show how large this really is. It is a whole village built right into the cliff.
We decided to do one major hike while we were there that would take us to the bottom of the valley, let us see some of the smaller cliff dwellings close up, and then end with some petroglyphs. It was a 5 mile trail with some ups and downs. It was really pretty seeing the dessert scenery, but we underestimated how hot it was actually going to be. As you can see in the picture below, the kids were already hot and tired before we even started.
As the trail came up out of the valley, it had some pretty cool cliff wall parts and rocks to climb through.
This was one of the cliff dwellings that we got to go right up to.
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