Well y’all, I don’t even know where to start describing what all we saw today! Going to the Mesa Verde National Park to see the cliff dwellings of the Ute Mountain Tribal Park was nothing short of amazing!

From the highest point’s fantastic views, to the intricacies of the dwellings themselves, the significance of preserving these ancient sites, to realizing how the literally carved out their homes and villages, made the tools to cook, store, eat, and and hunt to understanding my limitations as well as what I’m capable of, was just overwhelming.

This is a sacred and living space, comprising the rich cultural heritage of 26 Tribes and Pueblos, not only a National park, but a World Heritage site, and an International Dark Sky Park. It is to be respected and protected. Over 1,000 species of plants and animals including several that exist nowhere else on earth.

I don’t know all of the different Tribe names, but the Ute and Navajo were some of them.

We took so many picture together, got to eat some more authentic fry bread, and bought Rayven some souvenirs. I was not able to hike down to walk inside the dwellings, which was heartbreaking but entailed miles of hiking, climbing ladders and we had not known ahead of time that to do it wed have to buy tickets and join the next tour group. Good thing, since I could not do it anyway. However, we took tons of pictures.

The other thing you need to know is that you have to take backpacks with water, and snacks, etc., which we also didn’t know. We just drove to each interesting site and took pictures. This involved getting out of our car several times and walking to each site. So I still got over 5,000 steps!

David took so many pics of me and I took a few with him and we also took selfies. Some of the pics I debated if I should enlarge, but chose not to in the end because I want you to see the complete beauty of the pictures. Feel free to enlarge for detail. You will need to!

There were so many points of interest and we didn’t even visit them all but we were there for hours. It takes about an hour to get to the cliff dwellings, a long and curvy road leading up, down, and around,the cliffs to get to the actual dwellings-hidden within the canyons. The biggest one is called Cliff Palace-but there were several more plus pithouses and pueblos.

I think its best to put a few of the best pictures in a gallery and let you expand each one. I will put captions in each where I have something to identify. Some pictures are just to show the landscape, some to show the burned part of the pygmy forest, and some of the overlook showing the valley of Mancos.

I’m sorry that some of the pictures are out of order, but I enlarged some, David sent some, and so that changed the actual order in which everything happened.

I tried to document the best I could. Its a lot of info to remember too, but I know we took some overlook photos first, then went to the Cliff Palace, then the pithouses and kivas, and then the museum. On the way back, I shot some more pics of the cliffs, canyons, and valleys, so…anyway, I hope you enjoyed all of them!

There is so much more information describing the peoples, places, and things, that I don’t have time, but I grabbed maps and different park info guides, so I may do some posts later on more details of each place we visited. At certain times of the year, the cliff palace is lit from within which must be a beautific display. Its a very spiritual place, especially to the local tribes still living in Colorado and New Mexico today. We were very respectful as it is just so amazing.