Fortunately, not pants all weekend, our first morning at Mesa Verde campsite is quite lovely, we have a great spot to camp and I took this photo as the sun was rising.
We had never heard of Mesa Verde until a couple of days ago, when Stuart got chatting to people in a cafe, as he does, often.
When we looked Mesa Verde up we realized that it was quite different to the other parks that we had been to recently, so would be worth a visit. The books also said that it has 200 camping spots and rarely fills up, so that was handy for a holiday weekend.
Mesa Verde is based on top of a plateau ( at 7,000 ft elevation), so that involved several miles of driving along narrow roads with lots of switchbacks and steep drop offs
I'm sure that Stuart appreciated my words of encouragement (slow down or we're going to die!) as much as the cars behind us appreciated crawling along at 15 mph. A happy balance.
We spent most of our time (when we weren't sheltering from the rain) exploring the cave dwellings. These are villages that had been built 800 years ago by the Pueblo Indians and then abandoned after 100 years of living there and no-one knows why. The tours were fairly energetic and involved climbing ladders and through tunnels, which is just as well as we abandoned all thoughts of doing any other hikes in a case of rain stops play.
We did cook some pretty neat meals at this campsite, after stocking up with lots of healthy stuff at Moab. Although you may notice that Stuart managed to catch up on his Words with Friends games over this meal
Interestingly, it turned out that Mesa Verde has wifi throughout the park! No electricity or water hookups, just the key life essential -wifi!
Flora and fauna at Mesa Verde
(I believe this is poison ivy in the top right)
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