Colorado 2022: Mesa Verde National Park – 8/9/22 – 2.5 Miles
Breakfast on a road trip is usually coffee, yogurt and a cereal bar as Jim and I are itching to start the day’s hiking and sight-seeing. Today we changed it up (I know, aren’t we crazy kids?) by packing up and heading west on Highway 160 to Durango, CO. [Staying in Durango last night would have been great, but that would have pushed an already long day.]
The payoff: breakfast at the Durango Diner. Vintage, authentic, genuine, whatever you want to call it, this place is the real deal, pouring bottomless cups of coffee for more than 60 years. Photographs covered the walls floor to ceiling. A pay phone with an intact phone book hung on the wall.
We squeezed in at the counter to watch the organized chaos. The servers knew their stuff and the cooks knew how to keep things moving. Still, it took a little while to get our food because of the volume (table service and takeout orders too).
What would you like with that bottomless cup of coffee, hon?
Me: eggs & biscuits & gravy & home fries
(I couldn’t watch him eat it)
With full stomachs we continued west on Highway 160 and soon reached Mesa Verde National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Photos of Mesa Verde NP (MEVE) have long fascinated me. Aside from the breathtaking natural features of the mesas and canyons, the impact of human history lingers in thousands of archeological sites and 600 cliff dwellings in the canyon walls that were home to the Ancestral Pueblo (Anasazi) people.
Mesa Verde NP was the cornerstone of timing our entire Colorado road trip. Some of the larger sites had just reopened for guided tours after extensive shutdowns (“just” meaning the week of our visit) and we booked reservations to tour Cliff Palace on our second day. [The park website has a very helpful chart of drive times between features in the park so you don’t fool yourself into scheduling too much.]
Today was for driving and understanding the layout of the park without time constraints, hopefully a hike or two. After a stop at the Visitor Center, we began on the Park Road (well, the only road). Just two miles in, majestic Point Lookout rises from the valley floor, dominating the sky. What an entrance!
Okay, we’re convinced we need to get to the top without delay. Point Lookout Trail starts near the amphitheater beyond Morefield Campground. As we cruised through, we were surprised that the campground had few occupied sites. Maybe the mid-day transition time? With full services near the entrance (the only gas station, a camp store, restaurant and laundromat) it looks like a very comfortable base. [If you’re going, this is as far as trailers and towed vehicles are allowed. And if you’re not camping, there is a large vehicle parking area near the front entrance to the park.]
At the trailhead, just one other car (surprise again). Jim’s socks were still wet from yesterday’s crossing of Medano Creek at Great Sand Dunes NP, so he slid them onto the windshield wipers to dry while we hiked. (Doesn’t everyone do this?)
Another car pulled up as we were setting out, a seasonal employee of the Park. I was impressed that she hikes on her days off. She enthusiastically recommended the Petroglyph Point Trail on Chapin Mesa for tomorrow since Cliff Palace is nearby.
Point Lookout is 8,427 feet elevation, which explains my gasping for air on the climb. The trail started out level but quickly changed to steep short switchbacks that zigzagged up the mountain.
Looking back to the parking lot and Morefield Campground
Looking west – the pointy peak on the horizon is Ute MountainThe trail delivered us to the mesa on the top of the mountain and led us through half a mile of scrub and twisted trees. Amazing wood sculptures! I am fascinated by the “bones” of dead trees.
impossible to describe the feeling at the edge of a sheer drop
The steepness of the trail was just as challenging going down. To distract myself I counted switchbacks (28) and took many photos of flowers and rocks.
Jim’s socks were dry and we continued on Park Road. It’s similar to the Blue Ridge Parkway with overlooks and pulloffs. The difference is that the BRP was built for its own sake as an attraction through the Blue Ridge Mountains, while the Mesa Verde road was built to move people to artifacts and sites after the creation of the Park in 1906. The first short roadway was built in 1913. [Read more here.]
We passed through Morefield-Prater Tunnel and stopped at the Montezuma Valley Overlook, a short walk out to see an odd-looking formation called the Knife Edge. Before the tunnel was created, this was the passage of a rough road for horses and wagons and early cars to access the top of the mesa in the park. Hmmmm….
A park display at the trailhead explains: “A dirt road was completed in 1923. However, rock falls and landslides made the annual maintenance costs extremely high. This section of the road was abandoned in 1957 when the Morefield-Prater Tunnel was constructed. “
Next stop, Park Point Lookout is at 8,572 feet elevation (couldn’t they think of something to better distinguish between this and Point Lookout Trail?) This is an active manned lookout tower, today “womanned” by a ranger who scans every 15 minutes for fires, storms, and other weather phenomena.
A short trail north gives expansive views over the valley. We could see the town of Cortez to the west where we’ll be staying the next two nights. To the east we saw lightning and storm clouds releasing solid sheets of rain, moving towards us from the La Plata Mountains.
A short drive further to our last stop for today at Geologic Overlook (I’m getting the idea of simple names). There is only a pit toilet and a short trail to a different vantage point for watching storms forming and moving over the expansive Montezuma Valley. Don’t take these overlooks for granted, there is always something amazing to see!
Tomorrow we’ll return and drive deeper into the Park along Chapin Mesa. For now, we found our Airbnb in Cortez, a modest one-story home on a residential street, then wandered around the small town to find Wild Edge Brewing Collective on a side street. We listened to a lone musician playing Celtic music on guitar as we toasted to another fine day in Colorado.
"I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center."
~Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
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