Mesa Verde - Green Table

Exploring Mesa Verde
Thursday June 6 - Saturday June 8th

We continue to enjoy visiting Mesa Verde for a couple of reasons:

• The town of Cortez - just a few miles away - has a wonderful trading post which offers an excellent selection of Native American jewelry at a fair price - the Notah Dineh Trading Company.
• The campground still offers first-come-first-served camping - where the sites are fairly quiet.
• The old museum there has some wonderful artifacts showing the life of the ancestral puebloans. Many of the museums in the area have been stripped down by the experts to just showing the basics. We like detail and lots of information and this museum is fun because of all the weird and wonderful things they display!
• The cliff dwellings there are reasonably accessible and are well-preserved and protected.

Our quiet little campsite - private and secluded.
Only the cicadas knew we were there.

The museum

Gampground hillside bloom!

Clothing made of cactus fibers and feathers. Eileen Fisher would love it!

Warm booties made from turkey feathers. 

Cactus fiber sandals

A recipe for an already-chewed, aged, and buried treat. Yum?
Chew it up, spit it out and roll it into a pie to bury, cook and age for next month's luncheon!

Black on white pottery

Woven fiber sandals

So much was made from simple materials from the area.

Simple hand print says - "I was here!"

From Mesa Verde, we next drove up the overflowing Delores River Canyon to Priest Gulch RV Park. We had originally planned on camping at Molas Lake at 10,00 ft in the San Juans. When we realized that snow was still at 3 feet deep and the lake frozen over, we modified our plans to stay at a lower elevation,