Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado

We continued on the San Juan Skyway, which is a 236 mile loop starting and ending, in our case, in Durango. It can be done in a day, but we haven't finished yet and tomorrow will be Day 4. After leaving our remote campsite, known only to us and half the professional photographers in the western U.S., we stopped in Ridgway, another movie-set western town, to restock groceries and post a blog from the local coffee shop. From there, we visited Telluride. I don't ski, so I know less than nothing about the slopes, but between Telluride, Park City, Whistler and Jackson Hole, Telluride, as a town, unquestionably has the most character. We would have spent the night there, but since we had only traveled about 60 miles, we decided to keep going, pausing only long enough for lunch and to take a call from The Hedge Fund.


Have I mentioned the change in weather? We've experienced thunderstorms in three of the last four days and we woke up this morning to 33 degrees and crunchy grass.

Now, about Mesa Verde National Park. Even Ruby did not begrudge waiting in the VanMan while we toured through two amazing cliff dwellings. We decided to spend the night and see some more tomorrow. There are nearly 4,000 archeological sites within the park's boundaries, 600 of them cliff dwellings. One of them, called Cliff Palace, is the largest cliff dwelling in North America with 23 kivas an 150 rooms, likely housing 120 people. These dwellings probably took them 30 years to build, yet they lived in them for only 80 years and then left. It really is curious.