The second day.

We are so SLOW!!!  It takes us forever to get ready for the day.  I don’t know why this always surprises me!  Ken and Mark put together our second crock pot meal – Porcupine Meatballs before we went down to breakfast at the motel; boy was I happy to find that their milk was nice and cold.  After breakfast we packed snacks, made peanut butter sandwiches, filled camel packs and water bottles, located hats and sunblock and packed up extra clothes and food for Neil.  WOW!  We made it to the park Visitor Center about 11:00 to purchase our tickets for the first tour, only $3 a person, and pick up Junior Ranger booklets for each of the kids.

Thinking we had enough time before our tour to try and see Spruce Tree House; we headed there first.

It wasn’t quite as close as it looked, and by the time we got to it we had to hurry and look and then book-it back up the trail to the van so we could drive to the place for our tour.  The kids were so impressed.  It was so amazing to me to think that people actually lived in these tiny rooms.  Do you love the interesting T-shaped windows?We ended up being plenty early for the tour and so we enjoyed sandwiches before we got started.  Our first tour was of Cliff Palace.  It wasn’t a long hike, but we got to climb up 5 different short ladders.  It was officially discovered by ranchers who had permission from the Indians living close by, to use some of their land to run their cattle.  The Indians had found the cliff dwellings, but believed they were inhabited by evil spirits and so never went there.  As the ranchers first spotted this place one of them comments that it looked like a palace and the name stuck.Cliff Palace, the largest and most famous cliff dwelling in Mesa Verde National Park, has over 150 individual rooms and more than 20 round kivas (rooms for religious rituals or family gatherings). Originally these areas were covered with a roof of tree trunks and mud with a hole in the middle and a ladder to enter and leave by.Crafted of sandstone, wooden beams and mortar, Cliff Palace has been remarkably well preserved from the elements for the past 700 years.  It had a population of approximately 100 people. Out of the nearly 600 cliff dwellings concentrated within the boundaries of the park, 75% contain only 1-5 rooms each, and many are single room storage units.  The guide told us there is a small spring in the back of cliff (hidden from view) where the people would have gathered their water.  The compartments in the higher crevice under the cliff were used to store food. So neat!

Here’s us climbing back out….…and finishing our peanut butter sandwiches.Neil got his first bite of peanut butter, now that he’s one, and boy did he LOVE IT!  He looked like a baby bird with his mouth hanging open…more….more….more.Next we drove the Mesa Top Loop.  It was really nice because there were little stopping places all along it with thing to look at right near the road.  Most of them were the sites of homes previous to the period of the cliff dwellings.Neil discovered that he could help push the stroller and loved it!It seemed that we were putting Neil’s sandals on a numerous amount of times.  The Sun Point stop was really neat because we were wondering just how they were able to discover these holes dug in the ground that had been houses and here you could walk along outside and see the rocks all lined up into big squares that would have been the bases of the walls.  Another site on the loop was the tallest piece of construction in the park – a cliff dwelling four stories high.  Here Jessie’s showing us one of the cool trees we past, and Spencer took this picture of Mark and me.  He wasn’t tall enough to get the tower in the background, but was happy to feel helpful.Today all the girls wore our orange shirts, but we somehow forgot to get a picture of just us.  Here is most of the boys at a pull out where you could see a bunch of the tiny 1-5 room houses scattered across the canyon walls in little ledges and Cliff Palace.After the loop we decided to go back to Spruce Tree House to get a better look and to go down into a kiva that had had the roof restored to it.  Abbie’s holding onto the ladder and Spencer is climbing down it. The really amazing thing to me was the besides the roof and ladder the rest of the kiva was just as they had found it – all original.  Spruce Tree House was constructed between A.D. 1211 and A.D. 1278.Here are the kids inside.  The stonework behind the ladder was a reflector for the air vent (the part with metal bars over it so no ones tries to climb into it).  Their fires were in front of the reflector in the center of the room so the smoke could go out of the opening in the ceiling.  Each of the kivas also had a small hole in the floor about the size of a 1 cup measuring cup close to the fire.  It is thought the these holes had religious significance.We were going to go on a 2 mile hike after this, but the two youngest were exhausted….…so we returned to the motel for a little more swimming (until we found out there was broken glass in the pool and so the kids only got to go in the hot tub and that was kind of boring).  Our meatballs were fantastic.  We brought a tupperware of rice which we had cooked at home and then stored in the fridge in our motel room.  The cold rice was just perfect to cool down the boiling meatballs and while the kids took showers I ran to the store to get some apples, since I had left ours at home, and ice cream sandwiches for dessert.  Neil was delighted when the kids shared a bite of dessert with him and Mark was amazed at how big his bite could really be.