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.
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