Coming down from Mesa Verde National Park on Wednesday evening, we were able to see what we missed going up. There were beautiful storm clouds that never broke on us, but we were able to see them miles away.
slowly she turned
Living the Slow life in North Carolina
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Tower House
There are so many great photos that we took in Mesa Verde National Park. Not only are the ancient cliff dwellings fascinating, but the entire park is beautiful. Even the large area that was burnt by a wildfire in 2003 is bursting with wildflowers. It is difficult to pick only a few photos to share here.We stayed at the Far View Lodge in the middle of the park. Our room had a king-sized bed and a little balcony overlooking the park. We drove in very late the night before, when a bear and a large elk crossed the road in front of us. That morning, we saw either a small deer or an antelope near our balcony. It was standing in the shade so I couldn’t tell which. Later that day we saw wild horses, the descendants of escapees from the Ute Reservation next door from a couple of generations back, and I saw an elk resting in the trees across the road from one of our stops, quietly watching our tour group.
The ranger-led tour that we took that afternoon focused on three sites: Tower House, Tri-Cities (a site where three different cities were built and the kivas have been preserved under a shelter) and Cliff Palace, the most famous of the cliff dwellings. Mesa Verde is a UNESCO World Heritage Site because its 4000+ archeological sites include the best preserved sites, and its cliff dwellings are built into alcoves in the cliffs.
The cliffs are so tall and vertical that you have to marvel that anyone would choose to live there. The Anasazi originally lived on top of the mesas in pit houses around 600 A.D. and moved to the cliffs in the latter part of the period, around 1200-1300 A.D. One current opinion is that they may have moved to the cliffs to free up more land for farming on top of the mesa. When they left the area after a prolonged drought, they dispersed into the 19 Puebloan tribes of today.
When we were told that people with heart problems shouldn’t go on the Cliff Palace tour and that the exit involved ascending 100 feet including ladders, Sandy and I huddled for a conference and decided to do it anyway. He was fine and my grip held and so we went on a tour of a lifetime through the Cliff Palace.
top to bottom: Inside the Palace, the original steps to the Palace, and EEP! the first ladder.
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Durango looked like a lot of fun. But it was at the end of a long day and I had made reservations for the night at the Far View Lodge in Mesa Verde National Park. We stopped at the historic Strater Hotel and had dinner at the Diamond Belle Saloon. The food was great and inexpensive. We tried to get a room the next night but everything nearby was booked up because of a big bike race.
Sandy bought the hip hat that you’ll see in future photos on this street. We left Durango thinking that we would reach Far View in 30 minutes, but when we reached Mesa Verde at 10 p.m., we discovered that we had 15 miles of twisty uphill under-construction roads to go. The stars were beautiful, but unfortunately we were too exhausted to stay up and look at them.
The piano was 100 years old and the piano player was talented. I wish that I could play piano like this.
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I never really understood the appeal of wide expanses of flat open space until I made this trip through Colorado and New Mexico. The dearth of trees as soon as we left the Denver airport surprised me. By the time I got back to Broomfield, I too felt the love artists have for the “big sky.”
After driving through the wide valley that grew more and more arid, we turned west to ascend the continental divide at Wolf Creek Pass.
Cliff Chipmunk thought that he might get a snack from me, but scurried back into hiding when a hawk came swooping down for her snack.
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We made the decision to take three days to drive across Colorado to Mesa Verde National Park and back to Broomfield. There was a little bit of concern about the high altitude, but both of us handled it fine except for a little bit of short-breathedness in Leadville, the highest incorporated city in the United States at 10,152 feet. I was especially interested in visiting Leadville since I just finished reading Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner, an account of an Eastern woman’s life with a mining engineer in the late 19th century which was based on Mary Hallock Foote’s diaries and letters.
Early Leadville was a place that many characters from the Wild West visited. We were surprised to find a connection from Leadville to Skagway, Alaska, a town that we visited last year. It turns out that “Soapy” Smith, a con man who met his demise by gunfight by a fed-up townsman in Skagway, had fled there after being kicked out of Leadville.
There was still snow on the ground in the area around Leadville, and beautiful high mountain views. From there we drove south through the Arkansas River Valley.
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I am retroactively blogging my trip because we squeezed every moment to get all the juiciness when we were there. It was one of the best vacations evah. I am still uploading photos to Flickr.
Last Monday afternoon, we went to play in Boulder, which was only a few miles up the road. Pearl Street is the funky shopping district around the courthouse. We began in a used bookstore (you know we can’t pass a used bookstore) where I bought a copy of “Teach Yourself Welsh.” I’d never seen the Welsh language and since I’m about half Welsh I thought that it would be interesting. It ended up being a wildflower press for the trip.
The bookstore owner recommended L’Atelier, the restaurant next door, for lunch. The food was exquisite and very reasonably priced for such an elegant place. Our waitress (and I think the chef) was Czech. My aunt, who is going to Prague in a couple of weeks, asked her what her favorite Czech food was so that she could order it there. She said “sviĉkova.” Take note if you ever get the chance to travel there. We all had seafood of different kinds – I had the cioppino. There were many wildlife sculptures and Sandy decided to take a photo of each one we came across.
We got silly at the hat kiosk in the middle of the pedestrian mall.
Later we had tea in the restaurant in the historic Hotel Boulderado while we waited out a thunderstorm. Sandy and I noticed on our trip that the West preserves its old hotels and motels while in North Carolina we tear them down to build Best Westerns. Go figure. I find this very sad. Look at this finely crafted lobby and stained glass ceiling.
After we returned to Broomfield we took a walk beside the prairie dog apartment complex. This brave one let me get extraordinarily close before he ducked into his hole.
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Daddy and me on the homemade “go-kart” in downtown Marietta, North Carolina.
This photo of my Granddaddy Jones with his brothers and sisters had to have been taken in the teens or early 20s. He is the one with the guitar.
I barely remember Daddy Thad, my grandfather on the Parham side. He died when I was three. Here he is standing on the shore of Lake Waccamaw.
I’m not a corporate-made holiday person. I love my daddy and Granddaddy every day of the year, but Father’s Day is a great excuse to post photos of them. We swapped so many great family stories this week. I was absolutely a Daddy’s girl, and the memories of going fishing together (I got terribly seasick so didn’t get to go much) and learning to throw and catch a baseball are precious to me. I am such a tomboy.
Here’s a post that I wrote in 2005 about Daddy and farming that I like. He died so young, only 65 years old, and had rarely been sick before the colon cancer that took him. Get your colonoscopy, friends. It could save your life. You really don’t want to die of colon cancer.
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Sandy and I have decided to take a road trip through the heart of Colorado to visit the southern National Parks, since the rains of the last week have caused a lot of flooding in the north and east. We are heading south through the Rocky Mountains, hanging a right at the Great Sand Dunes National Park, with our ultimate destination being Mesa Verde National Park. We have no real plans, other than finding a hotel somewhere along the way for two nights, and getting back to Broomfield Thursday evening. This should be a lot of fun, and I’m sure that between the both of us we will take a thousand photos. This marks off a bucket list item for Sandy. Saturday night we danced and caroused at the Westwinds Tavern in Idaho Springs to my cousin’s husband’s band – Kenny Perkins and the Night Shift. I was amazed at how great they were. We were having so much fun that it was 1:00 before we knew it and we got to bed at about 2 a.m.! And I was worried about not being able to last the night.
Sunday we went to the Denver Art Museum and mainly spent time in the American Indian and Western American exhibits. I would love to go back to this museum and see some other exhibits. It is huge. King Tut is coming here right after we leave, dang it. We did get to see a few European modern artists’ work that I studied this past semester, such as Modigliani, Matisse, Archipenko, and Arp. This is a detail from a huge contemporary tapestry in the American Indian exhibit. I would have more photos from here, but our camera battery went dead.
Later we ate dinner at an excellent Indian restaurant.
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Sandy and I outside the Denver Art Museum
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As usual, my garden runs behind everybody else’s garden. I do have a couple of little peppers and the tomatoes are soon to come. The lettuce is just about to bolt in the hot weather, but there are many varieties in that patch under the maple tree, so I anticipate that I will be able to harvest the kinds that tolerate heat better for a while yet. The cherries are almost completely gone except for some of the “white” cherries, which are my favorites. It looks like I will have another bumper crop of figs, which I can eat until I make myself sick!
I still need to get more butterbeans in the ground. Maybe this week in the evenings. I have the room for more and plenty of seed. It would be a shame to waste the opportunity, but my hands are going numb as I write this.
My mama was talking about picking squash last night – she doesn’t give up her garden although she says that she is going to quit at the end of every summer. She is 86 and addicted. This year her garden is much smaller, which is good. Her garden was HUGE. Now she complains about nutgrass growing three feet tall. Nutgrass seems to be a particularly hard weed to deal with. I’d love to build her some raised beds so that she won’t have to stoop, but I would need a lot of help. She is putting off cataract surgery until the garden is finished this summer. This is a woman who knows the value of growing your own food.
Okay, I can’t type any more. My thoughts turn to going to Denver next week and setting up my Etsy store again at Slow Turn Studio. I relisted my older books and will have new books up there soon.
Update: Planted Carolina Sieva/Willow butterbeans in the same area where they were last year. (The beans look alike and got mixed up two years ago, so I guess I’ll have a nice hybrid after this year.) Planted Jacob’s Cattle beans with the peppers and broccoli. Pulled out the sugar snap peas and planted Tuscanelli beans (generation three from the ones I bought in the Mercato Centrale in Firenze -really they are cannellini beans. I have more beans but they will have to wait for a couple more spaces to open up. By the way, although it sounds like I have a huge garden, I plant a big variety of seeds in very small patches and containers in roughly a 20 x 20 foot space.
slowly she turned 