Come Along On Our Camper Adventures!

Today we started exploring a new park, Mesa Verde. It was so nice to see so much green (Verde!) after spending so much time in the desert the last 2 weeks. The park is smaller, but preserves vistas and cliff dwellings from the Pueblo people built over 700 years ago. A lot of this park is driving winding roads to get to the areas you want to explore, but once you got there, it’s pretty amazing. On our drive up today, we saw another bear and her cub. From a distance, it’s pretty cool. Wouldn’t want to run into on on a hike though. We also stopped at the highest point of elevation in the park, which housed 1 of 3 fire lookout stations in the park. The majority of the cliff dwellings require a ticketed ranger-led tour, which are very hard to come by due to capacity still being limited. But we were able to hike and see one of the cliff dwellings, Step House today. After that, we explored some of the vistas built. All of which involved some hiking and we didn’t start until lunch today so it was toasty!

Drive into the park and our mama bear friend

Fire Lookout Station

Step House (Cliff Dwelling)

Coyote Village and Farview House

After dinner we played this game Joe bought in anticipation of our trip, Trekking The National Parks. I swear it’s the most mentally challenging/complex game I’ve ever played, and there isn’t even any trivia in the game. It’s all strategy and you are trying to play 3-4 strategies at once to win the game. It was interesting for sure, but if there‘s a youtube video explaining all the aspects of the game, trust me, it’s complicated 😂

On a side note, one of the Park Rangers today told us a horrifying story from Mothers Day Weekend. He heard all this commotion and goes to investigate. He finds a 6 foot bull snake hanging from a tree branch (they are constrictors so they can climb trees) and the snake was freshly decapitated. Behind it was a mama squirrel and her nest. So the ranger thinks the commotion was the snake attacking the babies in the nest and mama squirrel bit the head off the snake. Totally gross, but he had photos to prove the story. He tells the kids “your mom will always have your back”. So at dinner we were discussing this again and the middle child says “mom if something was going to attack us would you bite it’s head off?” I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried 😂 But in answer to his question…Absolutely!