DH and I are on our way to Oregon and decided to stop at Mesa Verde National Park. However, before we went there we stopped in Albuquerque, NM to visit Marsha of
Grandma's quilts and an APQ block swapper with me and about 10 or 11 others. Below we are holding the quilts that we made from the swap in 2010. This was the first time that Marsha and I have met and she brought some other quilts to show me. I also showed her the quilts that I have in the camper as well as a few projects that I brought with me to work on. It was wonderful to meet Marsha after all this time.
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| Me and Marsha |
At Mesa Verde National Park we took a tour which included Cliff Palace as seen below. We took this picture from across the canyon. You can see the railing of the observation deck in the lower right hand of the picture. To get down to the cliff palace, there are metal and rock steps that lead down from the top of the mesa on the left side of the buildings.
After the Park Ranger gave us a tour of the palace area, explaining how they constructed it and the information that they know about it, we had to climb up some stone steps and some ladders to get back to the top of the mesa.
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| DH ready to ascend the steps (our bus tour guide is sitting on the left side of the steps) |
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| Here I am climbing the ladder to the very top. It wasn't as bad as we thought it might be! |
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| Here's another view of the crevice that the steps and ladders are in. |
Mesa Verde is an amazing national park and we would definitely recommend it. It preserves a spectacular reminder of the ancient culture of the Anasazi people, which is from a Navajo word sometimes translated as "the ancient foreigners." They are now called Ancestral Puebloans. They lived here for about 700 years until the late 1200s.
