Since we spent the night at the Far View Lodge inside the Mesa Verde National Park, we didn't have far to drive for today's tours. We had 1 ranger guided tour scheduled for 10:30, so that gave us the opportunity to sleep in. This hotel doesn't have a free breakfast, so we headed over to the Far View Terrace Cafe instead. Breakfast was good, and we were on the road by 9:00. There are essentially 3 main roads to Mesa Verde National Park. First is the entrance road which is 15 miles long and leads to our hotel. From hotel, there are 2 mesas within the park, both have Indian Ruins. Yesterday we headed down the 12 mile road to Chapin Mesa and saw the Cliff Palace Tour.
     Today we headed down the 14 mile road to Wetherill Mesa to take the Long House Tour . The road to Wetherill Mesa is much more challenging than the Chapin Mesa road. The mesas themselves are fairly large, but the interconnecting land bridges are usually very narrow, in some cases just the width of the road. In other cases, there is no land bridge and you have to descend quickly, and then ascend quickly as you go along. Needless to say, this was an awesome motorcycle ride, with some of the turns, climbs and drops so sharp we were down in 1st and second gear a lot. The one thing different about this ride was that the mesa is inhabited by feral horses who like to leave "presents" in the middle of the road. So every time we come around a blind corner, we have to react quickly to avoid the "present". For a car it would just be messy, on a bike, it could be disastrous. By the time we got to the tour parking lot we were pretty exhilarated.
    It only took us about 35 minutes to go the 14 miles, so we were almost an hour early for the tour. Fortunately, there is also a self-guided tour to the Step House from the same parking lot and it was only about a half mile hike each way . So off we went for the first hike of the day. This is basically a hike down the side of the cliff face, either with steps or switchbacks to get to the dwellings below. This was a loop, so the path down into the site was different that the path back up. Step House was a little smaller site than yesterdays tour, but there were essentially 2 sites in one as there was a pit house from about 500 AD and a pueblo from about 1200 AD. We could get close to the pit house, but could not go inside, but the pueblo was wide open to walk around and through.   It was a great way to start the day. By the time we finished and hiked back up it was getting about time to start the Long House Tour.
     It turned out that there were only about a dozen of us on the tour, so it was very easy to interact with the ranger. Ranger Bailey was a twenty-something newbie that it turns out had only been giving tours for about 4 months, but she was from the local area and knew a lot about the park. She was the best ranger we ever had for any of the tours we've been on this summer, just a great personality and a lot of knowledge about the sites and Indian culture . It's about a 2.25 mile round trip hike to this site, with the typical switchbacks and stairs we had become used to. We had learned to save our water for the trip back, as the trip down is downhill and the trip back is uphill. Hiking at 7000 ft elevation is a little tougher than at Florida sea level. Fortunately the weather was great, sunny and in the mid 80's with a little breeze.
     Once we got down into the cliff dwelling site, we were really able to climb among the ruins. We went from one end of the alcove to the other and climbed ladders to get between buildings. I was concerned about the height, but the only time I had any trouble was during a couple of the switchbacks where we were very close to a cliff edge. At the actual dwelling site it was very comfortable. It turns out that these particular Indians were farmers,. The farmed the mesa above and had large cities above on the mesa. There were some examples that we also saw. But for some reason about 1100 AD, they began to move down into the cliffside alcoves . Whether it was water or warfare, not much is known, but eventually about 1200 AD, they packed it up and left en masse.
    It took about 2 hours to go through the Long House tour, though a lot of that time was the hike. One of the things that Ranger Bailey had us do at the end of the tour was to have all of us yell as loudly as we could into the canyon and stop abruptly. It was cool hour the sound seemed to run down the canyon. As we were hiking back from Long House, we passed another self guided tour of an above ground village called the Badger House Community. Most of these above ground site are are reall just foundations and some walls as time really deteriorates these unprotected sites. At the Badger House Community site, the park has erected shelters over the site to protect them from the weather. They were interesting, but definitely not as cool as the cliff dwellings.
     This finished all the sites on Wetherill Mesa, so we got to do that wonderful 14 mile motorcycle ride back to the Lodge . We did make a couple of stops at scenic overlooks along the way to take pictures. Of course, the purpose of heading back was to get to the Far View Terrace as they have a little expresso shop that serves Starbucks. A couple of large lattes later, we were ready for more hiking. There was one more self-guided tour that we wanted to see at Spruce Tree House. Besides, the Chapin Mesa Archaeological Museum was right next door. So we headed back down the Chapin Mesa road, and stopped first at the Museum. We checked out the artifacts and also got to see the obligatory 20 minute video that we had not yet seen.
     The hike to the Spruce Tree House was not very long, though you could see the houses from the start of the trail across the way, it took a while to work our way down. This is the most well preserved of the sites, and includes 2 working Kiva rooms. There are ceremonial underground rooms that are entered through an opening in the top with a ladder. We both climbed down the ladder into the kiva and took some pictures of course . We toured around the site and one of the rangers pointed out some petroglyphs so we could take some pictures of them.
     By the time we finished up with Spruce Tree House, it was getting past 4:00, so we headed back to the hotel. Along the way we stopped at the Far View Site which is another above ground site that also included the ruins of a reservoir. We were done with our hiking for the day and when we looked at our pedometers, we had covered about 7.5 miles and about 17,000 steps. We stopped for a quick pizza and some ice cream at the Far View Terrace, and we were done for the night.
    I am starting the beginnings of a head cold, and wanted to get to bed early. Jody just wants to get caught up on her sleep. Tomorrow we head out for a scenic ride through the San Juan National Forest to get set up for our ride through Rocky Mountain National Park. Hopefully my cold gets better by tomorrow.

40.4 miles today
16,713.5 miles total

0.0 gallons today
396.858 gallons total