Month: May 2020

It’s about a 20 mile drive from the gate ($15 per person) to the top of the mountain at >14,000 feet.  It takes about 45 min to make the drive. The record, by a rally car champion, is about 8 min.

A lot of construction going on at the top; a new gift shop, no doubt.

One of the country’s most famous city parks, in Colorado Springs.

Virtual happy hour with Jay & Sue (and they were on their boat in Springfield, IL). We’re in Colorado Springs.

Waiting for a pizza. Neat little city RV park right downtown. We walked around seeing all the (closed) businesses.

The continental divide! Nearly 11,000 feet with The Raven. 30 mph on the way up, 40 or so going down. Great having engine braking in a diesel. The Garmin shows the elevation change.

Mesa Verde is a fascinating place. With COVID going on, the close-up/ranger-led tours are closed. But there’s still a lot to see, and the park was practically empty, which we loved. Several trails available, and you can get close to many of the sites.

It’s sort of an odd place in that the visitor center and the park entrance are about an hour’s drive to the sites (the drive is beautiful, of course).

The Park is massive, with thousands of discovered archeological sites.

The area was inhabited for hundreds of years (roughly something like AD800 to AD1500) but the cliff dwellings were at the end of that period, and  only were occupied for 150 years or so.  The cliffs were abandoned, and no one knows (really) what happened to the people.

Petroglyphs:

One of the cliff dwellings:

 

the tallest tower in the park:

Having dinner with our pals Phil & Alice and this neighbor walked by.

Took Hodor the Jeep to some Forest Service land near Chama. Got up in the snow altitudes and drove around on some logging roads. There’s a narrow gauge train that runs in the summer from Chama.