Mesa Verde, Colorado

I'll have to come back and write a journal entry for our day today.  It's been a long one and we have to get up at 3:00 AM to get to the early hot air balloon take off in the morning.  Not an attractive prospect because it's already 9:00 PM.  Fingers crossed.

Wednesday evening:
My blip is the Spruce Tree House at Mesa Verde.  This pueblo is the best preserved cliff dwelling with more than 100 rooms and eight kivas.  Until recently visitors could enter by means of a ladder.  There's been a collapse of part of the roof area and until it can be stabilized you can only view it from across way.  Other sites in the park require hiking to access and there are cautionary signs that tell you the hikes are strenuous and shouldn't be attempted by anyone not in exceptionally fit condition.

"The cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde are some of the most notable and best preserved in the North American Continent. Sometime during the late 1190s, after primarily living on the mesa top for 600 years, many Ancestral Pueblo people began living in pueblos they built beneath the overhanging cliffs. The structures ranged in size from one-room storage units to villages of more than 150 rooms. While still farming the mesa tops, they continued to reside in the alcoves, repairing, remodeling, and constructing new rooms for nearly a century. By the late 1270s, the population began migrating south into present-day New Mexico and Arizona. By 1300, the Ancestral Puebloan occupation of Mesa Verde ended."