We woke up alone in the middle of the desert today. I don’t think it was the best night of sleep for any of us. For me the main reason was the moon. Since we were all alone in the campground and it was still really hot when we set up camp we decided to leave the rain covers off the tents. We thought an added benefit of the decision would be the ability to see the night sky darken. I got to see some of the planets come out, but must have been tired because I was the first one to fall asleep. I woke up to what I thought was sunrise, but upon opening my eyes turned out to be a full moon directly overhead shining down on us like a spotlight. I checked my clock and realized it was only 3 in the morning. From there on it was a lot of tossing and turning until our alarms finally went off at 6:30.
We’re getting better at the packing up camp thing. We had the tents, sleeping bags, and pads put away, were dressed and ready to go by a bit after 7. Our plan for the day was to explore the Eastern half of Mesa Verde, so we started our drive early with just one stop at a Starbucks on the way.
We toured Cliff Palace and Balcony House. While Cliff Palace was the larger site I enjoyed Balcony House more since we were able to actually enter the structures and crawl through some of the same spaces the Ancestral Puebloans had 800 years ago. At several of the sites there were pictures comparing the restored sites as they stand today with the way they were found around 1900. Amazingly, there is actually very little restoration that has been done. One of the rangers mentioned that 90% of the materials in the various cliff dwellings are original. Their longevity is probably the best testament to the builders skill.
We’re back in Cortez at the Retro Inn for a couple nights now. I did some laundry this afternoon, everyone got a nice hot shower for the first time in a couple days and the blog got numerous updates! We were all ready for a good meal after subsisting on cheese, crackers, peanut butter, and cheetos for the last few days and Cortez delivered. For dinner we found the excellent Thai Cortez as recommended by the lady at the Guy Drew brewery yesterday. Everything was great and it was really nice to get a real meal.
There had been a promise of ice cream made at some point during the day and a quick google search turned up the adorable and delicious Moose and More. While enjoying our homemade ice creams we chatted with the owner about his path to opening the place as well as our travels. I’m pretty sure that we’ll be back for seconds after our hikes tomorrow. There were so many great looking flavors it’d be a shame not to have at least two.
Tomorrow we’ll be back in Mesa Verde for some more exclusive tours of the Wetherill Mesa area. The area we were in today had a very Yellowstone touristy vibe to it. Supposedly our tours tomorrow will be much small (and longer). Hopefully there will be a lot more to see as we walk all along the (Ancient Publoian) watchtower(s).
