Green Table (Mesa Verde)

Mesa Verde, CO

(Sightseeing)

May 6, 2017 - May 8, 2017

We drove from Monument Valley to Cortez, Colorado which put us in a good position to visit Mesa Verde National Park and closer to medical help if Laura needed it.  This was another spot we visited 30 long years ago which we thought was worth a revisit.  They have a beautiful new visitor center with some great information about the history of the area.  They have numerous examples of both free standing pueblo's and cliff dwellings in the park.  As you can see, the cliff dwellings are spectacular.

This is Cliff Palace, the largest cliff dwelling in North America.  Sorry it's not a better picture!
You can see the slope just beyond the buildings is quite steep, making the construction of this extensive site
even more remarkable in my opinion.

The canyon looking off to the south of Cliff Plaace.  It's rugged country
but they must have had everything they needed to survive.

This series of pictures are from the Far View area of the park.  It consists of
numerous distinct free standing pueblo structures within a relatively small area.  

In the distance you can see another group of structures.
There are 5 separate and distinct structures with a short distance in this same area. 

This was the view as we came down from Mesa Verde,
looking north towards the Rocky Mountains.

At this point Laura was doing fairly well, limping around on crutches for short distances and managing the pain with Tylenol but we knew it was going to take time for everything to totally heal.