Mesa Verde National Park

After reluctantly tearing ourselves away from our friends home we spent the night dispersed camping on BLM lands just outside Mesa Verde.

We were booked on the midday Balcony house tour which gave time view some of the other cliff top dwelling go from afar & visit the interesting visitors center & museum. The excellent Ranger Byron led us to the 32 ft ladder to climb into Balcony house, at the top were rooms, court yards & 2 kivas. It was an incredible place & you could imagine the Pueblo Indians who lived here roughly 800 years ago going about their daily lives. For some reason it was fairly abruptly abandoned & it is thought their descendants moved south, maybe because of drought, maybe because of threats from other people or maybe because the southern society was a more attractive proposition? No one really knows for sure although there was a 26 year drought around the end of their occupancy and their is evidence of fortifications so only one person at a time could enter via a tunnel - which might make sense if resources were scarce & they needed to protect what little they had.

We traveled back into Utah to spend the night in Goosenecks SP which is a great example of an entrenched canyon (i.e. the meandering river cuts down into the rock so it still has huge u bends & it almost cuts back on itself but is 100's of ft deep!)

The next morning we drove through Monument Valley, which was actually a little disappointing. Quite often the parks on Indian reservations are not well done, and there was little info and a truly shocking road you were supposed to drive down. Elvis did a few miles but turned away in disgust! I think they may do it on purpose so you have to take a tour, but they should sort it and they would get many more visitors. The one really interesting thing we found out there was the use of Navajo Indians as 'code talkers' in WWII. It's the only code that was never broken, and I bet they had fun thinking up native words for things like tank and bomb! After just reading a book on Bletchley Park its amazing how much could be achieved without any fancy equipment or resident geniuses.Read more