Mesa Verde Nat'l Park

We took our time this morning since we had gotten in so late last night. We stayed at the KOA in Cortez, Colorado and it had a pool. I promised the girls I'd take them swimming, so instead of rushing out after breakfast to see the next sight we went over to the pool for an hour or so and relaxed. For a 6 year old and a 3 year old, all it takes for a great vacation is a little time at the pool in your new bathing suit!

I had never been to Mesa Verde before. The first thing you notice about this park is the drive from the entrance gate to the visitor's center. It's a fifteen mile drive from the valley floor up to the top of the mesa where the visitor's center is perched. The theme of this park is a series of cliffdwellings that have been preserved from the elements by the caves and cliff overhangs where they were built. At the visitor's center you can purchase ranger-led tours of some of the dwellings that permit you to actually enter the pueblos and crawl into, over and through them.

Fortunately, they have some areas that do not require the purchase of a tour ticket. The pictures here are from the Spruce Treehouse which was open to touring without a ticket. The tradeoff is that you don't get to go into the pueblo. Still, the girls got to get up close and peep into windows and doors. In the picture to the left, they are trying their hands at milling corn. The bowl on the bottom is called a metate. It's kind of like an old washboard. The stone in their hands is called a mano.

You can read more about this at the following link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metate. We learned from the ranger that the sandstone that the Anasazi or Ancestral Puebloans used for these tools would leave a sand residue in their food that caused their teeth to grind down prematurely and caused them a great deal of pain. I should say so!