Cortez, Colorado

We spent several days with our friends Coella and Dave at their place north of Cortez. The beautiful Montezuma valley is surrounded by mountains and mesas. Beginning in the east there lies: the La Plata mountains, Mesa Verde (south), Sleeping Ute (west), and the San Juan mountains (north, not shown). Good water and fertile soil. After our wanderings in the dry Chihuahuan Desert, this seems like paradise to us!

Coella and Dave's house sure is nice, too!

Cortez, Colorado - The Muffler Man

North of Cortez lives an old fellow with too much time on his hands. He applies creative welding and white paint to old mufflers and pipes to make the strangest creations. Over time he's built an entire park. As you'll see, he has a sense of humor, too.

Goats graze in the park on all the lush green grass. Here are two noisy kids that enjoyed following us around.

Mesa Verde - Ruins

During the nine days we spent in the park, we visited many of the ruins. I found this site particularly interesting. It's a mesa top reservoir. The path in on the right site is where a ditch fed the reservoir. No evidence that I'm aware of that they distributed water from the reservoir to crops via ditch, so they must have carried the water themselves.



Cliff Palace, from above. The only way for the general public to access Cliff Palace, Long House and Balcony House is via Ranger led tours. We took the tours and, surprisingly, found the rangers to be both informative and insightful.












Here our tour guide Clyde prepares to lead the group up the ladder to Balcony house. To the upper left is the viga for which Balcony House is named.

This is a picture, taken inside a restored kiva, showing details on the cribbed roof construction. I've wondered how they used the pilasters on the kiva edge to support the roof, and here's how.

Long House. We visited Long House on Wetherill Mesa the day they opened the Mesa for the season. This was my favorite of all the big houses that we visited.

View from inside Long House, showing various construction levels.

Mesa Verde National Park - Around Camp

We went north from Heron Lake, through Chama New Mexico into Colorado, finally making our way into Mesa Verde National Park. They opened the campground on Friday the 15th and we pulled in on Saturday. They were more than a little disorganized. Computer systems were cumbersome, personnel inexperienced, communications not clear, campground loops only partially open, with most of the plumbing not yet functional. And we're paying full price for WHAT? In spite of all this, or maybe because of it, we found the campground and the park to be surprisingly calm.


Our NPS friends Dave and Coella dropped by our camp one night to visit. We made plans to see them in Cortez when we left the park. They're the last people on our list of folks we really wanted to see this trip, so we're just about done!

This is the second UniMog I've seen this spring. Both were licensed from Europe. Awesome go anywhere do anything campers, but, darn, I just can't image driving down the interstate in one. This one, by the way, is named Steppenwolf.

Many of the Mesa Verde campground restrooms have phone booths outside. These are US West phone booths, and they still have dial tone. This one lacked some glass ... Interestingly, the phone book is open to "Lodging".

Heron Lake, New Mexico

On our way north from Albuquerque, we spent a few days south of Chama at Heron Lake. Gorgeous setting. Lots of wind, as we've come to expect when it's springtime in New Mexico.

This lake, which is on the east side of the continental divide, actually gets it's water from the Colorado River basin, on the west side of the divide. From here, the water flows downstream into the Chama, eventually joining the Rio Grande.

Brilliant sunsets on the lake gave way to great star gazing.

One warning - if you visit this great state park with a 5th wheel trailer, you need to know that there are not many spots that can handle a large trailer outside of the full hookup area. Further, there are many roads into campsites that dead end with inadequate room to turn a large trailer around. Unless you want to back your rig out a long ways, walk it first!

Bandelier National Monument

While staying with Doug and Rona, we hauled the 5th wheel up to Bandelier
National Monument and camped there for several days. Doug was our tour guide. Unfortunately, Rona had other commitments and couldn't join us. Bandelier is the site of several ancient ruins. There's a pueblo in the valley, and, most interesting, several ruins along the canyon walls.
The canyon walls are very soft rock. The ancient ones utilized natural caves, in addition to some they excavated. Houses and other structures were then built in front of and attached to these caves. Joanie is pictured inside one of the caves.

We also came across some exotic, though all to common, plant species. By the way, it's rather hard to find a spot in the Bandelier campground for a 27 ft. 5th wheel ...

San Antonio Hot Springs is not too far from Bandelier, so we day tripped there. We rode our bikes about 5 miles into the springs, crossed a swollen stream and then enjoyed the spring's great hot water.

With good friends in Albuquerque

We headed north from Sun Dial Springs into Albuquerque. On the way we stopped by the Very Large Array (VLA) of Radio Telescopes. They're huge and they got a lot of 'em!

Once we got into Albuquerque, we were able to get together with a friend (and former work associate) and his family. We really enjoyed visiting and sharing a great meal with them. Robert and I worked together in the Wyoming coal industry in the 1980s. Our beards were not so gray then!

Here's Joanie, Robert's wife Toppin and their daughter Jennifer.

While in the Albuquerque area, we stayed on the east side in Sandia Park at our good friends Doug and Rona's. They've got a great gravel lot out back that we shared with Ralph, another friend of theirs.

Doug put Ralph and me to work one day roofing Rona's studio. I'm sold on metal roofing now. All in all, the project went easier than anticipated.

And here we all are, together by the hot tub in the side yard. Rona is holding their 7 month old Chihuahua named Sweet Pea. She's actually a pretty good dog.