Day 10 - Mesa Verde, Sand Dunes, and Pueblo

 Again, we woke bright and early to get out and on the mesa before the temperatures got to hot.  I will say that at this point in our trip the native East Coast members of our party were adept to how being in a desert works.  Cool at night and hotter than blazes during the day; a brief shower or 2, with hot sun in between. Never a cloudy day with no sight of the sun that occurs so much in New England. 

This is the statue outside of the Mesa Verde National Park Welcome Center, it's an ancient Puebloan climbing the sheer face of the mesa to get to the cliff dwellings where they lived. 

This is a cool formation that we saw while driving to our hike. 

Here is a little info on the National Park

Here is a topographical map of the Mesa, and a bronze statue of a Pueblo person, here you see Willa going in for a little kiss...

And then there is Mal...

We decided to go on a hike that was a little over a mile called the Soda Creek Trail, from there you could look across the cliffs and you can see what is called Balcony House.

 Balcony House

Then we went and checked out some of the artifacts that have been excavated from the many dwellings.  A short walk down from the building there is the "Spruce House," another cliff dwelling. 

This is a screen shot from my phone to see where we were on the Mesa. 

And they also found evidence of when Colorado was a Sea...

And then a few more people pics before we move on to our next location....

And a picture of a burn scar from Mesa Verde. There was a fire in the early 2000's and for as far as the eye could see there were skeleton trees across the landscape. 

On to our next location, 

This place is so crazy and we lived about an hour from here for so long and never visited, I'm so glad we did. According to the nps.gov here is how the dunes were formed. "The dunes were formed by the right combinations of wind, water, and sediment. Creeks and streams brought in large amounts of sediment and sand into the valley. Wind then blew the sand toward the bend in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, where opposing storm winds helped squeeze the sand into the tall dunes you see today."  Not sure why that one part is blue, but whatever, you get the idea. 

And next to the Sangre de Cristo Mountains they don't really look that big or impressive, but holy cow when you get up close they are freaking massive. At local sporting good stores you can rent special sand sleds.

I love this video, it gives you an idea of the vastness

So those are a few of the videos, here are some stills: 

 

After sledding we were off to Pueblo.  We lived in Pueblo for 5 years and made some amazing friends there, we were able to meet up with Brandy Kimball and her amazing kids (who my kids spent much of their childhood with) and with Regina Almintakh who also had a son that palled around with Cowboy.  These girls are one of a kind and it was so good to reconnect.  There were also a ton of guys that Jer worked with at Trane (the reason we moved to Pueblo to begin with) it was really cool that so many of the old crew were able to show up and reconnect.  We didn't get a ton of pictures, and I asked the kids if they had taken any pics and the response I got from Mal was "We were busy living in the moment Mom, we were just on our phones the whole time!" Which is pretty much what were all doing.  I did get a selfie of Brandy and me and of Billie and Ginny.  

The kids all split to go hang and swim at the pool in the hotel.  Brandy, Regina, Jer and I all went to a bar and played trivia - where we kicked butt for sure!

Then it was off to bed... Day 10 in the books