Mesa Verde National Park Highs & Lows | Square Tower House Tour, Far View Sites, & a hit and run 🤬

Today has not started how we thought it would at all. The next hurdle Mesa Verde throws at us. Massive wind. This is so cool. And our day ended with our bumper being smashed in. After spending the last two months in southern Utah, we've headed to Colorado for the next month and a half where we plan to explore small towns, go on epic hikes, and experience the state's history. And we're kicking off our time here in the southwestern part of the state at Mesa Verde National Park. This national park is home to numerous ruins of villages and dwellings built by the ancient Pueblo peoples. And today we're going to try to see and learn as much of the area's history as we can. Our visit to the park today might be a little different than if you visit for a couple reasons. First of all, the Wetherill Mesa Road has a weight limit of 8,000 pounds. Our van is like 8,300 pounds. So we are not able to explore that area of the park. The Cliff Palace Loop Road is also closed until mid-June. So we also cannot explore that area of the park. So today we'll be exploring the Mesa Top Ruins Road and Mesa Top Loop. And even with some limitations, there's still a lot of cool stuff that we are so excited to see here. We just got our first view of some of the cliff dwellings. So freaking cool. I've always seen pictures of them. Always wanted to come here. This is awesome. So a couple of fun facts about Mesa Verde National Park. It was the first national park to preserve the works of man. And there are over 4,000 archeological sites and over 600 cliff dwellings of the Pueblo people who lived here in the park. In these cliff dwellings, like the one right behind me, between the years 600 and 1300 AD. Well, we're off to a bit of a rough start. We knew that some parts of the park didn't open until certain times. Like the Mesa Top Loop doesn't open until 8 AM. It's about like 6 45 AM right now. But the trail we wanted to do first doesn't open until 9 apparently. So here it says Petroglyph Point, which is the hike we were hoping to do first. And Spruce Canyon Trail are open. But then you flip this up and it says Spruce Canyon Trail is temporarily closed. It's been deemed unsafe due to wildlife presence. So I don't know if that was supposed to cover both and it's all closed. We might now have three reasons why our experience here today will not be the same as yours. Alright, we just had another interesting turn this morning. You know, we parked down there. It was really early and we left here trying to go get some service to get some more information. And as we're heading out, a park ranger is coming this way and we're like, is that a park ranger? He's like, why is he going so slow? All of a sudden he turns his lights on, whips around, follows us. We're going back up trying to find somewhere to pull over. We get pulled over. He's like, hey, I saw you park down there. Your shades were up. Seemed like you were camping down there. Can I see your license? Okay. Gave him the license. You know, he checked it out and explained to him that we weren't. But at least we got some more information out of him. Everything was okay. It was fine. He understood. And we got a map from him. So we're going to try to figure out what we're doing next. This isn't the first time that we've been accused of camping like overnight in a national park, which you're not allowed to do. And we know that. And as y'all know, we entered the park early this morning. It's not the first time this has happened. The van and just putting the window covers up, which we do for safety so no one can see inside, definitely just puts like kind of a target on our back at times. So that's a side of van life that we've never really talked about, but it does kind of suck to be accused of doing something you didn't do. But once he believed us, he gave us some good information. He told us we could actually go down that Weatherill Mesa Road. We're like, well, we are overweight. And he's like, no, you're not. We're like, no, we are. And he's like, no, you're fine. He said it's more the length that's an issue. He said, you're not going through like water crossings or anything. It's the length. And we're under the length, you know, it's 25 feet. And we're 22 and a half. So I don't know. It's on the table now. So we'll talk about it. Think about it. So, uh, today has not started how we thought it would at all. And now we're going to regroup and figure out a plan. I guess plan C. Our usual big number one tip at national parks, busy places get started as early as possible. Does not work here. Yeah. Don't, don't get here too early. You're not going to be able to do anything. You might have to talk to a ranger. You might get in trouble, but all right, we'll check back in. So we finally found something that's open. This is the Farview site. This is actually the Farview, uh, great house. And on this lower floor here is, was 40 rooms. And then there was a second floor that had 30 rooms. This used to be like the main center of this big community that was here. And there's apparently a trail that'll take you around to some of these other little structures that are around, but the sign says that around, so imagine like in 1000 AD, this area would have been a bustling area. There's like little farmlands here. They will be, there will be fires going, all kinds of work going on. Children playing be a big bustling community. I'm trying to imagine that as we're walking around. So one of the stops on the little trail in the Farview area is the coyote village. And this one, you can actually walk through, which is really cool. And you can get up close and personal to these Kivas here, these big holes in the ground. These are the But apparently these, uh, the Farview sites were built much earlier, a hundred, 200 years earlier than a lot of the cliff dwellings in the park. This is the megalithic house and the way it's set up with the room structure and the layout, this tells researchers that this was a single family home. And it says on the sign over there that apparently half of this is still underground. So one of the ways to see the cliff dwellings and other sites here in the park is to drive the Mesa top loop road, which is a six mile road with about 12 overlooks along the way. However, if you're visiting between mid June and late October, 2021, this road will be closed, but the other road, the cliff palace loop road, which is closed for us right now, we'll be back open. So I think the moral of our story here at Mesa Verde is that there's things opening and closing all the time. Some things aren't open certain months of the year there's hours for trails. So just make sure you do a ton of research. We thought we did, but even we had surprises today. Lately, we've been loving the national parks where there's just a ton of history to learn. And it's not just all about the hiking kind of like Capitol Reef was. And this park is just mind-blowingly cool to see all of these really old structures and just learn how the Pueblo people lived here. It's also major information overload. So this is Cliff Palace, which is probably one of the most famous dwellings here in the park. And normally when the road, the cliff palace loop road is open, I think you can do a self tour and actually walk down and explore it on your own. It's so big. It apparently has 150 rooms. So even though there are a couple of cliff dwellings that you can do a self tour of while in the park, the number one thing we wanted to do while here today is go on a ranger led cliff dwelling tour. We're here in May and currently there are only two tour options you can go on. They're each an hour and a half. They're $25 a person and they're limited to only 10 people per tour. So the tickets for the tours go on sale two weeks before the tour date at 8am and they sell out so dang fast, like less than a minute. It's pretty crazy. We tried to get tickets, didn't get them. And then I checked every day for the past two weeks, trying to get us some tickets, couldn't find any. And then yesterday I just had this thought, I'll just check one more time. And by some miracle, there were two tickets left for the and I snatched those babies up as fast as I could. In our experience, the best way to learn about a park is to learn directly from the rangers. So we are super excited for this tour. And that is where we're going. All the way down there. We get to go down two different ladders to get to the cliff dwelling. This is so cool. After climbing down two ladders, we made it to the square tower house, which is named after the 28 foot tall tower, the tallest structure in the park. As we admired the dwelling, Ranger Taylor explained the progression of the structures in the park, how they are built and how they are preserved. Square Tower House is one of the very last sites to be occupied here at Mesa Verde, coming right up into the 1300s. Cultures start with this basket maker pit house, which is dug down into the ground. And then by the 1100s, we have these really cool masonry structures and we have these rooms that we call kivas. The kiva has a lot of tie-ins to that original pit house because it's dug down into the ground. It also has the entrance up on the roof where you go up and down using a ladder. There's a fire that burns in the center of this room, just like in the pit house. The kiva roof is a cool development from the pit house because they start to embrace cribbing technologies. Typically, these kivas are burnt as they're left, and so we don't see a lot of remaining kiva roofs. Typically, we find them burnt and collapsed in, which is where we have a really unique opportunity here to actually view a partially remaining kiva roof. It starts with the pit house and then we get these vertical walls with log posts dug into the ground. And then in between those posts, they weave branches and then they'll pack the adobe around those branches. And those are the Pueblo I style architecture. And then as we go into the Pueblo II style architecture, we start to see masonry and we start to see them shaping the blocks and using these sandstone blocks. The first step would be to walk six miles down the canyon to get the hard river cobbles that wash down and carry those hard river cobbles back up here, make an axe or a hammer, and then shape those blocks. You're also cutting down all of these timbers using a stone axe as well, and so it takes a lot of effort to make these building materials. The mortar that's holding the wall together is what we call a loam, and it's a combination of sand, silt, and clay. The early archaeologists that came through when they did their excavations, occasionally they would reconstruct walls where they felt like the site needed it to be stable. But generally speaking, we try not to do anything to the site unless it requires to be stabilized. And so this site has gone through several stabilization projects. A couple years ago there was a really big scaffold set up around the square tower from where they're putting in little stabilization mortars and things like that. But we're not rebuilding walls, we're just putting in stabilization mortars for the most part, and we're really trying to mimic those ancient mortars which are the loam soils that we see. We just got back from our ranger-led tour of the square tower house, and it was such an amazing experience. Like I said before, the best way to learn about the park is directly from the rangers, directly from the people that know the most. And I guess since the the tours were limited to 10 people, it just kind of gave it a more relaxed environment. It was more chill, kind of go with the flow. You could ask them as many questions as you wanted, and it was just great. It was so fun, and getting down there was fun too. We had those two ladders, and then once you're down there, the actual square tower house is just really, really neat. Out of the ones we've seen, it's definitely in the top ones. It has this 28-foot tall tower, and then what we thought was super cool is you get to see a roof or part of a roof of a kiva. We've seen lots, we've talked about kivas before, we've seen lots of kivas today, but we haven't actually ever seen the roof on one. So it was totally worth the money, totally worth the concert ticket like experience to get them. So if you can get them, do it. For sure. So shout out to ranger Taylor. He was amazing. Coolest guy. He was awesome. We also asked the ranger about the petroglyph point trail we tried to do this morning, which was obviously not open because it wasn't 9 a.m. anyway, but we asked him about that wildlife closure sign, and he said yes, the trail is closed because yesterday there was a black bear and some cubs on the trail, which this always seems to happen to us where the trails close the day before we try to go do them, but a black bear and cubs, they're out here. There's not a ton, but they're definitely in the park. The next turtle Mesa Verde throws at us. Massive wind. We came up to Park Point, which is the highest point in the park at 8,572 feet, and on this point they have a fire lookout that was built in 1939 by the Civilian Conservation Corps. Back in the day it used to be manned 24-7, but like I was saying, back in the day it used to be manned 24-7, but now it's only manned in the high fire danger season. All right, so our day started with getting pulled over by the ranger, getting accused of sleeping in the park, which we didn't do, then trail closures, and then our day ended with our bumper being smashed in. So when we got back from that Park Point fire tower, we were gone for maybe like 20 minutes or so. We just went up there. It was so windy, so we just came back down quick, came back, and our bumper was smashed, and that was not like that before, and there was no note left. No note, nothing. No one was there waiting for us to tell us I'm so sorry, nothing, and yeah, I don't know. It was a blow to the day, to be honest. We spent the last like hour or so, like we had to call 911 because we couldn't get hold of the rangers. Stuff is closed, like the offices and stuff is closed for a myriad of reasons. Yeah, a lot of things are closed in the park if you didn't pick up on it. Roads, offices, all kinds of stuff, restorations, all kinds of stuff. So 911 first. They connected us to the park ranger dispatch, and then they said they were sending out a ranger. He finally came, got the report filed, and we called the insurance, get that claim filed. The hard part is, is like we filmed part of the drive up to the parking lot, but not the parking lot, and then we filmed right like as we hit the trail. Right, you go on the trail, go up. The parking lot's just behind some bushes there, so there's probably, I mean it was seconds after we left, so there's the car, the possible car that hit us is probably still there, has to be there, and it's behind the bushes. We have no footage, nothing. We had a suspicion of what car it was, and so we gave that description, but we're not 100% confident just because of the color difference of like the scuffs on the van. So they were gonna go try to find, like they were gonna keep an eye out for that person, but it wasn't that busy when we got there. We asked everyone who came back to their cars after we found the van, did you see someone hit our van, did you see someone hit our van, and no one saw it happen. So there's no cameras in the parking lot. So we're now going to be stuck with the the repair costs ourselves. Thankfully our insurance is pretty good, but still and at least $500 that we didn't plan to spend. Plus since the van is our home, we don't know how long it's going to take to get it fixed, so we're gonna have to find somewhere else to stay for a I mean on the bright side, no one's hurt. Kona was in here unfortunately. She's okay. And the part that they hit us, that's probably like the best case scenario for getting hit, is like in the bumper. And I think just the bumper is damaged, not the frame or anything like that. But if it was something in the back or the side, like it could have damaged something in here and that would have just been even more of a headache. So that's the silver lining I guess. Yeah we're very glad Kona's okay. That's the number one thing and we're fine and the van will be fine. Brisket will recover. Oh yeah. It's just a stronger better than ever. It's just a blow to our wallet and kind of just to the day. I mean we had the middle part of the day Mesa Verde was fun. We enjoyed the park. We really enjoyed the tour. Oh yeah. It was just kind of not the smoothest day that we've had. So if this is your first video watching of ours, this is not how things normally go. Things usually go much smoother. But if you're going to come to Mesa Verde, beware. There's crazy people parking in the parking lots and flying out. But okay, I think we've rambled enough. We got back to our campsite. We are going to just relax the rest of the night. We have a really a ton of fun adventures here in Colorado. We're so excited. This wasn't the best way to start off our time here, but we have so many fun things planned, including what we're hoping to do in our next video. I'm going to say hope because at this point, I just don't even know what the universe has in store. It should be a lot of fun if everything goes to plan. But yeah, I think we're just going to decompress a bit and then hopefully we'll have a smoother adventure next time. And over 600 cliff dwellings. We get to go down two ladders to make it to the cliff. So even though there are a couple of cliff dwellings, it's so hard to say. This national park is home to numerous ruins ruins. I want to say ruins is.