Yet another beautiful day in America
Mesa Verde is a flat-topped mountain bisected by a deep and relatively fertile canyon. It is also the site of a great human mystery; why after over four hundred years of continuous occupation did the Pueblo Indians suddenly leave the area to move south?
The Pueblo architecture developed from simple dwelling houses to more permanent strongly built villages on the top of the Mesa living amongst and tending a wide variety of crops. At some point they decided to build very complex and sophisticated multi-storey communities into the ledges, caves and undercrofts of the near vertical rock faces of the canyon. If you have any theories as to why the Pueblo Indians first built their incredible cliff dwellings and secondly why they left them in such an abrupt manner please send them via email to the Mesa Verde Park authorities they will be as good as anybodies over the last one hundred and twenty years since the unusual habitations were discovered by modern Americans.
There is a very instructional guided tour by bus accompanied by a Park Ranger. We descended, with a guide, to one of the cliff villages and discussed ideas as to where, what and why, but the only certainty seemed to be that doom was only a few feet away if we slipped.
Some of us decided to tour the Park in our Morgans so after tightening up all the nut and bolts that had loosened on our journey we set off for a gentle ride. The cars seemed to treat the fifty percent reduction in oxygen at the Parks altitude of eight thousand feet above sea level with great stoicism unlike their owners who gasped and wheezed with every slight excursion.
A wholly European supper to say thanks to the arranged for the cars to be road legal in the US and Canada.
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