After lunch, we headed up to Mesa Verde National Park, where we will spend three nights in the park lodge.  There will be little or no Internet or cell phone service, so the blog will go dark for a few days.  We have stayed in national park lodges before (in Glacier Bay, Alaska, Yellowstone, Wyoming, and Big Bend in Texas), and the situation is always the same.  It’s actually rather nice—you are really on vacation when no one can send you nagging notifications!

Mesa Verde was established in 1906 to preserve another set of dwellings from the Ancient Pueblo People, as they are referred to here.  They used to be referred to as Anasazi, but “Anasazi” means “Ancient Enemy” in one of the Puebloan languages, and the term is therefore very offensive to the modern day people of the Pueblo clans.  The Pueblo People were peaceful.  No implements of war have been found at any of the sites, and so to call some of them enemies is not only historically inaccurate; it is also disrespectful of the culture at large.  

The park encompasses a number of mesas with deep, narrow canyons in between them, and there are dwellings left both on top of the mesas and down in the canyon walls. The most ancient dwellings are those on top of the mesas, which date back to around 600 CE.  Those were pit houses of people referred to as Basketweavers, because when the site was excavated, huge numbers of extraordinary baskets were discovered.  The park also has a large number (603) of cliff houses, which are incredible structures reminiscent of those at Chaco Culture and Aztec Ruins, but which were built into naturally occurring alcoves in the cliffs, formed by erosion.  People moved down into these alcoves and built huge houses, and commuted, essentially by scaling the walls, to the tops of the mesas, where they continued to farm.

Today, we just stopped at the visitor center and then took a long slow drive up to the lodge, where we will be staying, stopping at all the overlooks along the way.  You will see from the photos that we saw some quite stunning views.

Addendum:  Tim was just telling me that there is a display (which I missed) in the visitor center about the first man who identified artifacts at Mesa Verde.  He was from Sweden. (Why the first archaeologist to survey the territory here and catalogue houses and artifacts was from Sweden rather than from the US is not addressed [I went back and checked later.  No idea.]  He evidently did a very good job of identification, but then he absconded with thousands of the artifacts back and they ended up in a museum in Helsinki.  (Helsinki is, of course, in Finland; no explanation was offered as to why the Swedish collection should have gone to Finland.) This angered the local Puebloan people, of course, who saw the removal of the artifacts as theft.  No word as to whether the artifacts have been or will be returned.  What was that I was saying about the Elgin Marbles??

The lodge is not run by the National Park Service, but rather by Aramark, and we are not, so far, very impressed.  When we checked in, we were told (among other things) that the restaurant in the main building requires reservations, but that it was full up for dinner tonight. So we figured that after we got to our room, we could call and make reservations for the next two nights that we will be there.  Alas, the phone in our room is totally dead.  It is not possible to call the desk, even, to get a question answered, let alone make reservations.  I found the number for the restaurant reservations in the lodge services book in the room and tried calling on my cell phone; however, it rang and rang and no one answered.  So we schlepped back down to the main building and I talked to the woman at the desk in the restaurant, who told me that the reservations are handled at the check-in desk.  ???????!!!  So the chick who checked us in, knowing we wanted reservations for tomorrow and the next day, did not bother to tell us that she is the very person we needed to talk to. 

Naturally by this point, there was a long line at the check-in desk.  The woman in front of us had some problem (we didn’t hear what) which elicited a comment from a maintenance guy, who was sitting at the desk, that “It’s really frustrating, isn’t it?”  Not a great sign.   The people behind us had just checked in, only to discover, when they got to their room, that the room had not been cleaned.  NOT good.  They also told us that they had tried calling the desk to make dinner reservations, but twice the phone was picked up and they were put on hold and no one ever came back again.  Service without a smile.

We made it to the front of the line and made our reservations (nothing before 8:15 tomorrow—WAY past our dinner time and approaching our bedtime!), and we told the girl about the phone.  (I say “girl” because she looked to be about 12.)  She said she would send maintenance around, but she didn’t bother writing anything down.  I give it less than one chance in 100 that the phone gets fixed.

The next issue was to figure out where we could get lunch tomorrow at breakfast time, so we could carry it with us down to a remote part of the park where we have a tour scheduled for 9:00 a.m.  The book in the room disagrees with the woman I did eventually get on the phone (not in the main building—somewhere else with a direct-dial number), disagrees, we would eventually discover, with the person staffing the desk in the morning, and so on.   Apparently no one really knows anything.  The book in the room is a disaster.  If you come here, ignore it completely.

We were able to get dinner at another place just upstairs from the very full restaurant.  The Far View Lounge has a very limited menu of sandwiches.  (This is why you want reservations at the restaurant downstairs, which has, if anything we have been told is to be believed, a regular menu for dinner entrees.)  That was fine, and we ordered.  When the food came out, however, it was not what we had ordered—at least, it was not what I had ordered.  Tim got the sandwich he ordered, but, as it turned out, the waitress brought us the order for another table, where someone had ordered the same sandwich.  She didn’t really want to believe me when I told her I had ordered a sandwich, and not the salad she had brought.  “Are you sure?” she asked.  No, of course I’m not sure.  I can’t remember what I ordered 10 minutes ago off of the menu which has about 8 items.  Fortunately for the other table, as our order had gone in right after theirs, they didn’t have to wait long to get the salmon sandwich which had been intended for Tim.  I might also add that they had also ordered a hamburger, but there was some problem in getting that delivered (I only heard part of the conversation), and they were still waiting for that after we had eaten and paid and left.)

The goofiness continues apace!  We’ll see how things go tomorrow in the restaurant.  Anyone taking bets about our phone?