The Great Wander

You’ve probably already picked up on this, but after the Great Sand Dunes National Park and the Rio Grande National Forest, we made our way to Mesa Verde National Park and the Durango area.  After being at the campsite outside of Great Sand Dunes, when we saw we had showers at Mesa Verde, we were in heaven!  It was pretty exciting, showers, running water, laundry mat, not quite the roughing it style camping that we’ve done in the past, but after 5 days, we enjoyed having the opportunity to clean up!

As I mentioned, we took one day to ride the train from Durango to Silverton.  Stunning, amazing, beautiful, all of these words describe the scenery on that ride.  When we booked our train ride, we booked an open air car, which we were glad about, because it gave a better opportunity to get some photographs while we were riding, but also just feeling the wind on occasion was great.  I also mentioned that we found a doggie daycare for the dogs, which was great.  Kona was excited and having fun all day.  If you are going to be in the area, Healthy Hounds and Fat Cats is a great place to leave your animals.  A bonus is that they are located right near the parking lot for the train, so you drop them off first thing in the morning and within five minutes, you’re parking your car at the train depot, getting ready to head up to Silverton.

Silverton reminded me a lot of Park City or maybe even a bit of Jackson, WY.  Nice little touristy town, you can easily see the town in about two hours and still catch some great views of the mountains.  There’s several good brew pubs and pizza places up there, and if you want to buy some rock climbing or hiking gear, you’ll find that too.  It’s a neat little town, but the real attraction there is the train ride up to the town.  You’ll find views of waterfalls, great mountains views, lots of trees, it’s a very different way to experience the mountains.

When you buy your ticket, it’s assigned seating, so if you pick the wrong side (I couldn’t tell you how to know which is the wrong side) initially from your seat, you’ll get a lot of views of cliff faces and not much else.  However, you can easily stand up and look out the other side of the car so you can see the views of the river and the waterfalls.  The second thing about that is you cross several bridges, so the views change.  You will be able to see something other than the cliff face from your side of the train.  Total was about 3 hours up the mountain.  We took a bus back down to ensure that we didn’t have a late fee for picking up the dogs, but you can take the train back down and your ticket is for the same seats.

The next day we stayed in the national park.  We dropped the dogs off at the daycare there, which like I said last week was nothing to write home about.  Really, I wish we’d done the 45-minute drive back into Durango and left the dogs at Healthy Hounds.  It would have cut our day short, but for them, it would have been worth it.  I would not recommend using the dog kennel at Mesa Verde National Park.  It’s about the only thing I wouldn’t recommend there.

Visiting the different parts of the park, of course, the highlights are the cliff dwellings that are there.  Cliff Palace is the largest of those, to see it, you will need a ticket, which is available at Recreation.gov.  Ranger assisted tours are only about $8 and you will have about 30 minutes to see the dwellings.  You are only allowed across the front edge of the dwelling.  The park service years ago shut things down to seeing the back areas of it to help preserve the dwellings as well as honoring the spiritual nature of the site for the descendants of those who lived there.

I remember, when I was a kid and lived in Germany, I didn’t believe that the US had any structures that rivaled the age of some of the castles and cathedrals in Europe.  I didn’t realize that that’s not quite true, and while these dwellings might not be as old as the Colosseum in Rome, 800 years still rivals many European castles and cathedrals.

Wandering through the parts of the dwelling that you can, it really is awe inspiring to see these dwellings that are so old and have held up so well.  The skill of the indigenous population that built this is amazing.  One the structures are well built.  Two, building these structures into the sides of cliffs that are not easily accessible is pretty amazing as well.  The brick, the binding material, the wood, all had to be hauled up by hand into some difficult locations to access.

The park isn’t just about cliff dwellings though.  There’s a great deal of scenery and some landscape throughout the park as well.  From one vantage point you can see Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico, as well as Bears Ears National Monument and some stunning landscape. 

If you’re heading through the Southwest, put Mesa Verde on your must-see list.  I wish we had given ourselves more than one day there, there were a few other spots I wanted to get to, but the way we have things planned for this trip, it was what we had.