Mesa Verde National Park, Day 2

Shiprock, NM

Sunday, May 27 - Day 2 at Mesa Verde National Park, CO - Miles Today, 4085.5 For the Trip

Well, for those concerned, I did manage to grill a hamburger & steam some green beans for dinner. It was still windy, but not enough to blow the grill off the table. I also found I can get both a Verizon & an AT&T signal here at the campsite, although both are fairly weak & slow, even with the exterior antenna & amplifier. The campground WiFi is satellite, which doesn't work all that well with Dreamweaver. In any case, I got the pages uploaded & went back to the trailer to make dinner. Met a couple & their cute baby in a truck camper in the next site that had also driven up from Arizona - they really didn't like the wind & dust!

As I expected, there was no need for the air conditioner yesterday or today. In fact, last night I dug out the electric blanket & electric space heater. That was after it hit 37°F at 9:00PM. At 4:00AM it was 27°F. I may be a wimp, but that heat felt wonderful!

It warmed up to the low 60's fairly quickly. I headed out for my 10:30 tour of the Long House, and stopped for a bit at Park Point Overlook, the highest part of the park (8572') . Took a panorama, but didn't include it. I did include one image of part of the view & one of the fire lookout tower as well as many other photos of many stops throughout Mesa Verde in  today's LakeshoreImages Page. Unfortunately, until I can get 1&1 to fix my pages, you probably won't be able to look at them.  For some reason, all the pages are requiring a password.

After that I finished the drive to the tour. We had the greatest tour guide I've ever had on a National Park tour - Ranger Paula Wolfe should get some kind of award for her tours. After touring the Long House I made short stops at a couple of other sites Wetherill Mesa area, then shot the Kodak House from the overlook.

I wanted to revisit the Spruce Tree House, the self guided tour that we took on our last visit in 1996. Being Memorial Day weekend, it was much busier than the last time but I took a few photos. I also stopped at the overlook for Cliff Palace & the hike to the overlook for Balcony House.

After the trip to the Mesa Top Loop I stopped back at the trailer to add the photos to the computer, then headed to Shiprock to take a photo. Shiprock is a wonderful structure, however the weather did not cooperate. No dramatic clouds, no color to the sunset, and a haze probably caused by the numerous wildfires in the area. So, nothing special, but one of them is today's photo.


I stopped at the Shiprock McDonalds to upload the images, but it was so slow I gave up. I had better luck at the McDonalds in Cortez. After that it was back to the campground to put the actual pages together. The pages are being loaded here in the campground over the slow Verizon connection, but since the images are much larger than the pages I need a fast connection for them.

Till tomorrow -