Last stop in Colorado.

Mesa Verde National Park was our last stop in Colorado. This is a site inhabited by Native Americans for thousands of years. They built these cliff dwellings during the last 200 years or so that they lived in the area. No one knows why they moved to the cliffs, or why they abandoned them.

Part of the huge Mesa.

To get to the first cliff dwelling, we had to:

Climb this huge ladder.

Then shimmy through this small passage.

These are doors. The top door would have been reached by ladder.

The houses were built right into the cliffs.


This is a kiva, a ceremonial chamber. It would have had logs across the top forming a roof.
People got inside by climbing down a ladder in the middle of the roof.

This is an original wall painting.

At one point we squeezed through this passage.

At another we crawled through this hole.

To leave, we had to climb this ladder...

Then amble up this path!

This was another cliff dwelling site at Mesa Verde.

Colorado

We made our way across Colorado.

On the west side of the Rockies, we ended up on a detour - this one lane dirt road.
It was gorgeous, but took us two hours to go 50 miles!

We wound through open ranges, and this group of horses walked right up to the car!

This herd of skiddish mule deer crossed our path several times.

We stopped for this amazing view of the mountains.
The photo doesn't do it justice.

We spent some time near a little mountain town called Ridgeway.
We passed this herd of bulls many times.

The Man.

The Riverwalk in Ridgeway.

View from Box Canyon Falls.

Box Canyon Falls.


Looks like a movie set. This is an old mining town called Silverton.
There's really just the one main street, but you have to take an extremely
scary mountain pass highway to get to it. Many of the buildings still have the actual store fronts.


Silverton City Hall. Built in 1908.

The Midwest

Damon and I had the great opportunity to take a roadtrip to the South West. This first batch of photos are mostly from Nebraska where we were followed by a storm most of our second day of driving. I took over 300 pictures of this trip, so I'll let them do the talking!

Packed to go. Mom and Dad are seeing us off.

The entire state of Nebraska looks like this.

Sunset near Lincoln, Memorial Day weekend.

Storm clouds rolling in.

The sign on the right says "Business District."

The storm was catching up to us, the sun was setting, and we saw a double rainbow.
(The second one is very faint, to the right of the darker one...)