Mesa Verde II

 We spent the last day at Mesa Verde relaxing in the morning at Morefield Campground and then heading up to Farview Mesa to visit Balcony House and for a twilight tour of Cliff House.  I was a little dubious about the twilight tour which was billed as meeting some of the historic people from Mesa Verde, but it turned out to be a highlight of our time.  We first started at Balcony House, which is reached by climbing this ladder.  Balcony House is unusual for several reasons.  It has several balconies (see the photo below) and it has a wall at its edge (see the photo below the balcony photo).  The brown matter between the layers of clay in the balcony is made from the bark of the juniper tree.  These balconies          
 are original and you have to crawl through three tunnels and climb several ladders to get there.  No one knows why there is a wall either.










   














 We then drove around the Mesa Top Road stopping to look at numerous ruins.  This one, Tower House, has the tallest structure in Mesa Verde (four stories).  It was being stabilized (which hadn't been done since the 1960's).









Eventually we came to an overlook of Cliff House at the juncture of two canyons.  Visible from the point were twelve different cliff dwellings and the Sun Palace (a structure built at the very end of the occupation of Mesa Verde and never completed).  It was extremely regular, in the shape of a D and had rocks that had pecked markings on them.  This was the Fire House ruin and you can see the toe and finger holds between the two upper structures.  We then went to the Archaeological Museum and by chance heard that the cafeteria at Cliff House was closed, so dashed back to Far View for dinner before our twilight tour.

Our ranger, Tom Wolf, had been visiting Mesa Verde since the mid-fifties.  He was an engineer whose father became the head of the Bureau of Reclamation and oversaw the construction of Glen Canyon Dam.  In his family were two female archaeologists, one of whom became the head archaeologists at Mesa Verde.  He gave a fascinating tour focusing on water and engineering.  When water was brought to Mesa Verde (to increase tourism), it increased the water that soaked through the sandstone into Cliff House.  Half of Cliff House is built on bedrock and the other half is on fill.  In this photo you can see a large rock with three cracks and a hole in the upper left.  It cracked in the 1920's as a result of increased water pressure underneath it and the NPS cut the hole to relieve the pressure.  At the time the NPS was not using engineers to stabilize the foundations of the structures.  In this picture, the round tower sits on the last of the bedrock.  To its right, all the structures are built on fill.  There are multiple kivas in Cliff House, which were perfectly round.  Each kiva was built by one of the clans (the Ancestral Puebloans were a matriarchy).   They are becoming deformed due to the super saturation of the fill from water introduced by the NPS.  They are now trying to correct the problem.  He told a very moving story
about following a young guide on a tour of Cliff House and she wasn't moving her group through fast enough.  He was about to go to her and ask her to hurry up when her group began to sing.  Cliff House has wonderful acoustics and they sang for 10 minutes.  It turns out they were Hopis and were singing a healing song for the kivas and their repair. The NPS is now very conscious of its relationship with the tribes and will repair the structures with their involvement  He also argued that Cliff Palace and Balcony House were built as fortifications.



His two aunts disagreed over the usage of a round structure on the top of Mesa Verde.  One of them thought it was a reservoir and the other thought it was a dance surface.  For decades they never got permission to study the 90' round depression.  Finally in the 21st century it was studied and conclusively proven that it was a reservoir.  This tour of 16 people in the twilight was magical; fascinating information, a wonderful presenter and a solitary visit to Cliff Palace.  






















                    The next morning early we took off for Ouray.  We had been debating going through Telluride, but the Film Festival is this weekend and it is packed with folks.  So we took off on the Million Dollar Highway.  It showed evidence of numerous mud slides from the monsoon rain Sunday evening.  There were big dozers and dump trucks that had cleared the road.  It began to rain as we went up Red Mountain pass out of Silverton.  We lucked out and saw the steam train leaving in Silverton.  We arrived in Ouray where it was raining, set up Snoopy and hunkered down until it stopped.  Last night we saw a movie on the San Juan Mountains narrated by C.W. McCall (of "Convoy" fame).

Canyons of the Ancients

 Since we have three days in Mesa Verde, we decided to spend one day in Canyon of the Ancients National Monument.  It is northwest of Mesa Verde.  We drove first to Dolores and the Anasazi Heritage Center to get directions and suggestions of where to hike.  There are a limited number of hiking trails, but we headed to the south trailhead of Sand Canyon.  It was hot and we headed off with hats, sunscreen, lots of water and lunch.  Here you can see a little area of soil and vegetation in the midst of the rock.  There was lots of evidence of the force of the flash flooding from the rain Sunday night.

 We were alone on the trail.  Here are some hoodoos (eroded structures with harder tops).  We saw hoodoos with very thin table tops.












The first site we came to was Saddlehorn Pueblo, so named because the rock looks like a saddlehorn.  Supposedly there were two smaller structures on a pinacle 100' above the cave, but we never saw them.  We stopped for lunch in the shade.  Archaeologists believe the pueblo was lived in from 1250-1285.













                 
Overlook into Sand Canyon.












Our friends Joe and Vera Wiatt with Sleeping Ute Mountain in the background.  The Ute tribe had been running the tours to Balcony House and Cliff House in Mesa Verde, the two real money-makers in the area.  However, they wanted to have Sleeping Ute Mountain which is sacred to the tribe, so they traded the land on Farview Mesa for Sleeping Ute Mountain.  No one is allowed to climb it.






We made a circle hike by leaving the Sand Canyon Trail and going over a mesa and down into the East Rock Creek Canyon.  There were more pueblos and ruins on this part of the trail than on the Sand Creek trail, though you cannot get very close to them due to their fragile nature.  There were two ruins here; one on the right and the second in the left cave where you can barely see a tower on the right side of the cave.





This was another ruin in the distance behind the two ruins above.












Here you can see the two caves in the white stone and the one cave in the red rock that are shown in the above two pictures.











The rock structures, colors, solitude and open spaces were breath-taking.












If you look carefully you will see two dry rock structures on the top and right side of the rock in the center of this picture.

























This was one of the most interesting pueblos we passed with its two walls and the alcove on the lower right.  It was not evident to us how people got into this cave, which was quite deep.

Weatherill Mesa, Mesa Verde National Park

We met up with Joe and Vera Wiatt as planned in the Morefield Campground within Mesa Verde.  We got up Monday morning and decided to explore Weatherill Mesa.  It was opened in 1972, after I had worked here in 1970.  When Bob and I came to Mesa Verde six years ago we didn't go out here either.  It is much less visited than Far View Mesa.  Once you get there, there is a biofuel tram that takes you around.  We first visited Step House, visible here on the left.  It is distinguished by the fact that there are two different sites within the cave; a Modified Basketmaker site (626) and an Ancient Puebloan site (1226).  The Basketmaker site has pit houses and the Ancient Puebloan site has the masonry construction.
 Here you can see a petroglyph rock and the amazing masonry of the Ancient Puebloans who had to build on very uneven surfaces.  Approximately 30-40 people lived in this pueblo.










 After eating our picnic lunch we took a guided tour with Ranger Wendy of Long House, the second-largest cliff dwelling in Mesa Verde.  It is known for a very large, square, dance area in the center and is thought to be a center for surrounding pueblos.









Here you can see three types of construction in an area for storage which is above Long House.  There is the masonry (made out of blocks of sandstone about the size of a loaf of bread), dry laid rocks (used when water was scarce and the Ancient Puebloans did not want to waste it to make mortar) and mud and daub (the construction type used on the top of the mesa).






One of the wonderful things about Long House is that we were alone in it; a great contrast to the more popular ciff dwellings on Far View Mesa.











One of the unusual things about Long House is that it had seep springs in the back of the cave.  Seep springs develop when a sandstone layer (porous) meets a nonporous layer (shale).  Due to the torrential rain we had Sunday night, there was lots of water, including water falling from the mesa top down over the edge.  The Ancient Puebloans dug tiny water collection pools in the rock and used ladles to get the water out.  Here you can also see lots of metates and manos to grind corn.




Long House has a large number of kivas.  Kivas had six pilasters to support the roof (representing the four cardinal directions, earth and heaven), a ventilation shaft (seen behind the deflector in the wall), a deflector to keep the air from blowing onto the fire, a sipapu (the little hole in the floor) which represents a spiritual connection to the earth, niches in the wall and seats.  The roof would have been made of wood and covered with dirt and clay.  In the winter the kivas were warm; in the summer cool.


















In the dance court there are four unusual formations like this.  They were for drums played during dances.  Wood or hides were stretched across the rock walls and feet were used to beat out the rhythm.









After we toured Long House we rode the tram around.  Here is an overlook onto Kodak House (so named because a Swedish archaeologist stored his camera and film in a room in this ruin).  Weatherill Mesa is named after the Weatherill family who farmed in the valley near Mancos and were early explorers of the sites.  They were Quakers and felt that they had a duty to protect the artifacts and the area, though they served as guides to many groups who came in and took artifacts.  We listened to a ranger presentation (supposedly on the stars but it was too cloudy).  He answered questions.  Some interesting tidbits:  there have been a lot of fires in Mesa Verde, particularly on Weatherill Mesa and attempts to reseed the area fail.  It takes 75-100 years for the junipers and Pinon Pines to regrow.  The relationship between the park and Puebloans is good since the NPS has stopped digging up graves (though there are very few remains found here).  Few Puebloans visit Mesa Verde because they feel it is full of spirits.

Great Sand Dune National Park

 We left Tunkhannock early Tuesday morning August 20 for Cincinnati, Columbia Missouri, Dodge City Kansas and Great Sand Dunes National Park (which we reached Friday evening).  Great Sand Dunes has the tallest dunes in North America (750' high), created from the prevailing winds that blow the gravel and sand from the west up against the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.  The sand is up to 350' deep in the San Luis Valley, settled first by the Spaniards.  It used to be a lake bed and is very flat.  There are two streams that surround the dunes on each side and wash the sand down in the spring where it is blown back onto the dunes, which have remained remarkably constant over hundreds of years.
 We woke the next morning and decided to climb to Mosca (Fly) Pass, up 1,700'.  For us flat-landers, it was tough at first, but we stopped a lot and tried to identify the wildflowers along the way.  It gradually went up until we reached this high meadow below the pass at 9,750'.  We were surprized not to see any wildlife.  We were pretty much alone on the trail due to our early departure (8:00 a.m.).






On the way back, the dunes were framed by the valley we had climbed.  We then drove to Valley View Hot Springs, up near Mineral Springs at the north end of the San Luis Valley.  Like all our hot springs adventures, we got lost and eventually had to drive a long dirt road towards the mountains where we found this absolutely delightful set of hot springs that are now part of a land trust.  I had last been to these springs in the 1960's, when they were known as a place to drink and get high, the water was dirty and there was a lot of trash.  In 1970 the property was purchased by a couple who developed it into something akin to Brietenbush Hot Springs.  There are camping spots and lots of different pools (all of which we sampled).  They ranged from quite warm (106 degrees) to barely body temperature.  They limit the number of people in the area, so it was peaceful and a great place to soak away the aches from our 7.4 mile hike in the morning.

The next morning, Sunday, we took off for Mesa Verde National Park to meet Joe and Vera Wiatt with whom we are going to travel for the next six weeks.  Here you can see the dunes below the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.



In addition, the valley was ablaze in sunflowers.  As we headed over Wolf Creek Pass we got into rain and fog.











A last view of the Great Sand Dunes, first described by the Spaniards and then by Zebulon Pike.

Fun Around Tunkhannock

We don't generally work on the weekends and we don't work when family comes to visit.  Cathy, Markus' daughter, and three kids drove up from Philly for three days.  Fun was had by all, including catching frogs around the pond.  The pond has been a miracle this summer.  It isn't leaking and due to some good rains it is full to overflowing.  We go swimming almost every day.  Miro and Zax love to catch frogs (though they are not successful).



















Here Bob is helping Miro and Zax catch fish.  Once we figured out that grasshoppers were the preferred bait, Bob's job was to catch the grasshoppers and put them on the hooks and help the kids put their catch into the aquarium on the deck.  They were released each day.  They caught a lot of fish (six to eight each day).







While her brothers were catching fish, Anaya was sitting in the pond splashing and enjoying life.  She is a completely mellow little girl who entertains herself for long periods.










Here she is really enjoying spaghetti.  She is also a really good eater.












One cool day we headed for Stony Brook.  None of us had been there since the flood two years ago.  There is still lots of evidence of flood damage; new rip rap, new road, repaired bridges, dead trees in the stream, a dam scoured out, etc.  Stony Brook was running high.  There is a flume you can ride down.  Both Markus and I did it several times.  It's quite exciting.






Here I am going down.













We also went to the Triton Hose Company Carnival (home of all things fried).  In addition to steamed clams (quite good), there is pizza, piroghis, pulled pork sandwiches, ice cream, potato pancakes, fruit flops (fried bread dough with fruit on top), beer and carnival rides.  Miro and Zax got to ride the rides while the rest of us watched.







Cathy rode the carousel with Anaya.












We also went to Steamtown National Park in Scranton to ride the train and look at the museum.  At one time there were more miles of railroads in northeastern Pennsylvania than anywhere else in the US.  There is still a shortline railroad that operates.  Steamtown used to be in Maine or Vermont until it fell on hard financial times and the National Park Service stepped in and moved it to Scranton.  We ate lunch at Abe's Deli (a true east coast Jewish deli).






Mom, Markus, Carol, Bob and I went to the Montrose Blueberry Festival which is a benefit for the Montrose library.  There is a tremendous book sale and we all bought piles of books for as little as 50 cents apiece or $10 for a huge box.  Markus got lots of Zane Gray books of the wild west and old first edition adventure books.  There is a museum in the fire hall (which used to be a house).  The fire department has been around since around 1827.











Montrose was quite a wealthy town and we walked around and looked at the mansions.  This was the jail until the 1990s.











Here is one of the beautiful houses in Montrose.












Another weekend Bob, Mom and I went to Hickory Run State Park so Bob could play disc golf.  Mom and I walked down one side of Hickory Run and up the other.  One side was through a tunnel of rhododendrons and the other side was in the trees.  The stream was in dappled shade and we saw only two other people.







Another view of Hickory Run.)
















Another weekend Mom, Markus, Bob and I returned to Honesdale, after a detour to buy maple syrup, so that Markus could see the Sturbridge Lion (the first locomotive in the US).  We walked around Honesdale, which also had a lot of nice large houses, including this armory (now the YMCA and having seen better days).







Elizabeth drove up from Philadelphia to visit for three days and we took a walk on a rail-to-trail just outside Tunkhannock.