Two Breathtaking National Parks in Colorado

Colorado was our next state to visit.  We had previously camped in Colorado on our way to meet the Alaska Caravan in 2015.  But, of course, we needed to chase some stamps in Colorado for Buck’s Passport book. 

Our first stop was in Cortex, where we visited the Mesa Verde National Park.  There we learned about the ancestral pueblo people and their world.  About AD 550, long before Europeans explored North America, some of the people living in the Four Corners region decided to move onto the Mesa Verde, which is a Spanish term for “green table.”  The “Four Corners region” refers to the shared borders of 4 states:  Utah, Nevada, Colorado, and New Mexico.  For over 700 years these people and their descendants lived and flourished here, eventually building elaborate stone communities in the sheltered alcoves of canyon walls.  In the late 1200s in the span of a generation or two, they left their homes and moved away. 

Mesa Verde National Park preserves a spectacular reminder of this ancient culture.  Archeologists have called these people Anasazi, from a Navajo word sometimes translated as “the ancient foreigners.”  We now call them “Ancestral Pueblo people,” reflecting their modern descendants. 

This group of people lived in cliff dwellings. They built their villages beneath the overhanging cliffs.  Their basic construction material was sandstone that they shaped into rectangular blocks about the size of a loaf of bread.  The mortar between the blocks was a mix of dirt and water.  Living rooms averaged about six feet by eight feet, space enough for two or three people.  Isolated rooms in the rear and on the upper levels were generally used for storing crops.  The construction proved that they were experienced builders.    

Verde, or green areas of farm lands, provided opportunities for the people to grow crops.  Corn, beans, and squash were farmed.  The people hunted wild animals and gathered a wide variety of edible and useful plants.

They used their skills to make tools from stone, wood, and bone and built pit houses for homes that were often clustered as small villages on mesa tops and in cliff alcoves.  These people became expert potters and acquired the bow and arrow, a very efficient hunting tool.   

Mesa Verde’s economy was more complex than you might think.  Even in a small farming community, some people would have more skills than others at weaving, working leather, or making pottery, arrow-points, jewelry, baskets, sandals, or other specialized articles.  A surplus would be shared or bartered with neighbors.  Exchanges also took place between communities.  Seashells from the Pacific Coast and turquoise, pottery, and cotton from the south came to Mesa Verde, passed from village to village or carried by traders on foot over a far-reaching network of trails. 

When the cliff dwellers of Mesa Verde left, they joined thousands of other Ancestral Pueblo people who were moving south into today’s New Mexico and Arizona, settling among their kin or establishing new communities.  Today, many pueblos trace their ancestry to the Ancestral Pueblo people of this area.  Some are descendants of the ancient builders of Mesa Verde. 

In the first picture below, note the guided tour provided by a ranger at the Mesa Verde National Park.  

Cliff Palaces at Mesa Verde

Our next stop for camping was near the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park.  Congress has protected over 17,000 acres of the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park as wilderness under the 1964 Wilderness Act.

Cutting through Rock with Water…Weather…and Time 

When explorer and engineer John Gunnison, seeking a Pacific railroad passage in the 1850s, judged Black Canyon impenetrable, he referred to the difficulty of getting from one side to the other.  He could not have known that the river had hewn the canyon walls from a dome of extremely resistant crystalline rock.  A geological event now known as the Gunnison Uplift had raised the canyon’s rock from deep in Earth’s basement.  Two million years ago, its course determined by the location of high mountain ranges, the river began cutting through the uplift’s core with rocks, gravel, and sediment.  When further empowered by floodwaters, it gained speed through a steep descent from the surrounding mountains.  It wields huge boulders that scour trees and chisel the canyon bottom—which has not yet been reached.  Time is the Gunnison River’s unseen but equal partner. 

The Black Canyon of the Gunnison, in my opinion, is second only to the Grand Canyon in Arizona.  The massive wall of rock speaks for itself.  Please enjoy the pictures we made at this canyon. 

Note the hair-pin turn up ahead for us.

We were traveling in our truck at this point.

The Gunnison River flows 1800 feet in the canyon.

Painted Wall at Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park

 After two nights in each of the two previous locations in Colorado, we traveled to the town of Fairplay, a place we won’t ever forget.  We had been warned by friends about this little town/campground just south of the very popular ski resort in Breckenridge, CO.  Between Breckenridge and Fairplay our ten-year old Mandalay chugged up the steep mountain pass.  Huffing and puffing, we pulled over at the top and let about 25 cars go by.  As we neared Fairplay, we noticed the very small houses along the side of the road; some were pink, others, purple, and turquois was a very popular color, also.  We missed the road to get to the campground, so I called the office with my cell phone and found that we had passed it by.  Buck U-turned our 60 ft. rig in the middle of a two-lane highway and we backtracked. We turned left into a shopping center, turned right to go behind the shopping center, saw some RVs and continued down a narrow driveway with a tight left turn into the campground.  There we received our site number.  We were one of only three motor homes in the RV park, which, by the way, provided power only.  No water or sewage was available.  We had been fore-warned by a good friend about the lack of provisions, so we went into the campground with a tank full of fresh water and an empty sewage tank.  And we survived just fine.