Next we went to the ancient Mesa Verde ruins. Those are ruins of the Ancient Pueblo people or cliff dwellers. These people built sandstone houses right into the sides of the cliffs. Man, they were smart. My mom and I split up from Pa and Patti for a couple of hours. We went on tours of two different sites. One was called Cliff Palace. The other was called The Balcony House. My favorite was the Balcony House. There were many obstacles, like a 32 foot ladder on a steep incline to reach them. It was the hardest thing there and a little scary at first. My mom and I climbed next to each other, so it wasn’t that hard. The ruins were amazing. The rooms seemed really livable and neat. On one of the walls, there was a faded, non-obvious ancient handprint. We actually got to walk through the rooms as long as we didn’t touch the walls. On the way out, there were two more very hard obstacles. The first was a 12 foot long, 1 foot wide tunnel we had to crawl through. Wow. It was fun for me, but not for my mom. The last obstacle was a 60 foot high, almost vertical, “staircase” carved into the mountain with only chains to hang onto. When we got done, we drove off with Pa and Patti and heard about their adventures in Mesa Verde.
Andrew, I work with your dad here at Dow Corning. I went to Mesa Verde when I was about your age too, it still looks pretty much the same, but was pretty cool to see how this group lived so many years ago!!!! (My mom was a teacher too, so I got to do all these educational trips, but they were fun).
ReplyDelete