July 4th - Cortez, Colorado

For our final day in the Mesa Verde area we explored the town of Cortez. In particular, we drove in to find a decent breakfast and found one at the Anasazi Restaurant, which had a lot of local pickup trucks in front. I had a 4th of July special that consisted of French toast covered with blueberries, red cherries, and white whipped cream—red, white, and blue, get it? It was a regular brawl of flavors—all sweet!

Coping with sugar overload, we drove up to an Anasazi Heritage Center near Dolores, Colorado. This center is run by the Bureau of Land Management and has a museum and an excavated pueblo. We first took a short ranger led walk to the pueblo and also enjoyed the views of the Sleeping Ute Mountain to the west and the McPhee reservoir to the east.

The museum has an extensive collection of Anasazi (nowadays called “Ancestral Puebloans”) artifacts recovered from the McPhee reservoir area before the land was inundated in the late 70s and early 80s. It was quite different from, and complementary to, the old CCC-designed museum at Mesa Verde. This museum had fewer displays but ones that were more thematic and complete. I enjoyed the cutaway view of a pit house with the artifacts arranged inside as they would have been in daily use at that time.

This museum complements the Mesa Verde collection because it emphasizes the development of the Anasazi culture on the sagebrush plains from 600-1100 whereas the Mesa Verde collection emphasizes the cliff-dwelling period from 1100-1300. This additional information gives invaluable context to the Mesa Verde structures. One point that was extremely important to me is that there was an early period of depopulation of the plains settlements around 700-800, apparently due to climactic changes. To me that makes it far more likely that the second out-migration from 1200-1300 was also at least in part due to climactic changes such as the documented 24 year drought.

The displays included a nice selection of pottery and tools from the sagebrush plains settlements. Those aspects of the ancestral puebloan culture were covered well in both museums, with the Mesa Verde museum having somewhat more details in the written explanations. But one exhibit unique to this museum was an exhibit on the modern archeological processes. I had no idea that they used magnetometers to chart the direction of magnetic north in the burned dirt and thus date the use of the fire pits in the dwellings. They emphasized that the raw artifacts had to be interpreted in a context, a point I also often made about human behavior in my days as a psychological researcher—interesting to see it made in a completely different field.

At the information desk Monika obtained a map for the recently-created Canyon of the Ancients National Monument. This monument has several sites that are open to visitors, and one site, Sand Canyon Pueblo, was not too far away on the dirt and gravel roads. So after lunch we took off into the hinterlands to find this site. It was good that we had the map and our GPS because there were no signs anywhere that marked the route to the site. We almost missed the site because the entrance sign was just over a blind hill amongst the weeds. I went screaming past downhill, unable to stop on the gravel road, and had to go another mile before I could carefully turn around and return to the euphemistically titled “parking lot”, which was dirt.

But there we found a big tree I could park under, so we took our water and pocket GPS off for a hike. The GPS was really useful when we got turned around at one end of the hike and lost the trail. If you visit these sites, don’t count on anyone else being there to help you find the way because it is absolutely deserted. The site itself had been excavated and then refilled in the 1980s, and we couldn’t see much from the trail at all. It gave us an idea of how the site originally looked to archeologists before the excavation process—a mere hump of rubble is the only surface sign despite the fact that this was a very big pueblo site with over 100 rooms.

Drinking water every few yards and using the GPS, we found our way back to the truck and drove back to Cortez where we had spotted a do-it-yourself car wash. The truck was filthy and we spent a few minutes and lots of soap and water getting it if not clean, then certainly cleaner. After all this effort we rewarded ourselves with sundaes at Dairy Queen before shopping at Wal Mart and driving back to Mesa Verde for dinner, after which we drove up to Park Point, an overlook at the highest point of Mesa Verde to watch the Fourth of July fireworks.

Arriving about 8:30, we carried our chairs from the parking lot out to the overlook and sat down to wait for the fireworks to start in the valley below. That gave us time to really enjoy the sunset turn the sky into fiery shades of red in the west. After dark the fireworks started in the town of Cortez and I tried to take some pictures from our eagle’s aerie—darn difficult at 10x zoom using ½ second exposures!

But we were really surprised by flashes of light off to our right—the town of Mancos, just a small village at the foot of the mountain. It was so small, a crossroads really, that I had not expected them to have any fireworks at all but they suddenly started shooting rockets into the air. Their fireworks display was at least as big and as long as the much larger town of Cortez, which goes to show that size isn’t everything. To top it all off, the town of Dolores about 15 miles away also started shooting off big rockets and bombs. So we had a view of the fireworks for 3 different towns at once, which I imagine is something you can’t get very many places in the U.S.! That produced almost constant bursts of color against the dark valley and mountain background, albeit from 3 different directions so we had to keep turning our heads. But it was also profoundly quiet since we were apparently far enough from all of the displays that the sound didn’t carry to us. All in all, it was a very unique way to celebrate the 4th of July. All the displays wound down around 10 p.m., so we drove back down the mesa to the campground—it was trickier in the dark, of course, but I had driven that route several times and knew what to expect and that helped a lot.