Mesa Verde & Four Corners

On Wednesday, the CVCC Southwest Adventure group visited the Spruce Tree House cave dwellings at Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado...

AMANDA HIGGINS - FARMINGTON, NM - We got to sleep in a little later this morning and didn't leave the hotel until about 9 a.m. We then made the nearly three hour trip to Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado.

Nicole Whitener climbs into a kiva at Spruce Tree House at Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado...

Around 1400 years ago a group of people living in the Four Corners region chose to settle in Mesa Verde. They built elaborate cliff dwellings where they thrived for nearly 700 years, until they moved in the late 1200's. Today, Mesa Verde National Park serves to preserve what is left of this ancient culture.

Josh Boone, Claudia Eller, and Dale Hamilton explore the cave dwellings of Spruce Tree House at Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado...

We arrived at the park around 11:30 a.m. after a very curvy, but scenic drive up a mountain. By the time we go into the park, tickets were sold out for a guided tour. Sounds lousy, but it worked out great! We were able to explore at our leisure and really take in our surroundings. The cliff dwellings were partially roped off, but we were able get very close and even go inside of some. We got to use the same grinding stones that the ancient people had used to grind corn and other grain. A group of us went down into a kiva together, we all held hands and had a moment of silence. Then, Claudia Eller, Chris Reidel, Jessica Childers, and I took a trail to look for petroglyphs. The terrain got pretty rugged and we were running out of time, so we decided to just turn back. On our way back down the trail, we all stopped and just sat down. Not because we were tired, or lazy, but because we could. We sat there silent and tried to imagine the way it would have been long ago, when there was still residents in the cave dwellings. We thought of the peace and ease they must have felt, being in such a beautiful place and surrounded by such wondrous landscapes. Then, through the silence, wind rushed over the trees and whistled throughout the mesa. We just looked at each other and smiled. We didn't find any petroglyphs today, but we found a little peace... a moment where we could just be.

The marker at Four-Corners indicates the exact spot where the states of Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico meet on the map...

After Mesa Verde, we went to the Four Corners Monument. This site is where Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah meet. It has the distinction of being the only place in the United States where you can stand in four states at one time. There is also a Navajo and Hopi open air market, where local Native Americans sell their goods to tourists. Most of the items for sale were handcrafted by the vendors and their families. We all enjoyed shopping for ourselves and our loved ones back home, while helping to support the local people.

Dale Hamilton and Christy Perez explore the Four-Corners monument while Richard Eller shoots video. The Four-Corners Monument is the location where Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah meet...

The day was not over after we got back to the hotel around 7:3o this evening. We all had to load back into the van, with our clothes. Our destination? A laundromat. We all had to pack light and today marked the halfway point of our trip, so we were all running low on clean clothes... just another part of the adventure.

Tomorrow, we will be visiting a Navajo Prep School before we leave Farmington, New Mexico for two nights in Tuba City, Arizona.