Colorado Coda

Continuing our time in Colorado, we traveled south from Black Canyon to the small town of Ouray (pronounced "YOU-ray"). It bills itself as "the Switzerland of America," and is nestled in very steep and craggy mountains.

Ouray is definitely a tourist town, and off-roading also seems to be a popular sport here. We saw many places renting jeeps or all-terrain vehicles, and people also brought their own.

During our stay, we drove south 25 miles to the town of Silverton, CO on the "Million Dollar Highway," a steep and winding road cut through the mountains. Now, one million dollars may not seem like much to you...

... but back in the 1880s when the road was first blazed, that was pretty expensive highway building! It was first built privately, and rumor has it was the cost was $1M per mile.

The Million Dollar Highway stretches through an area that was extensively mined for gold, silver, and other minerals from the 1880s through the 1960s. You can see abandoned mines and mining structures as you drive along. One particularly impressive view was of the mine sites around Red Mountain. It almost looks like the mountains were strip-mined, but all the mines were underground - that red color is natural to the peaks. There are piles of mine tailings everywhere, and some of the creeks run with strange colors after it rains. There are ongoing cleanup and reclamation efforts, some funded by mining companies.

There are also beautiful waterfalls and interesting geology along the road.

These fossilized ripples are from an old stream bed, tilted vertically over millions of years.

Telluride, the ski town, is about an hour away from Ouray, and we drove there one evening for a delicious, socially-distanced dinner along the main street.

There is a lot of hiking in the Ouray area, including a perimeter trail that winds around the whole town. We didn't have time for that, but we did hike to two local sights. The first, Cascade Falls, runs down a cliff face for a couple hundred feet.

The other local site we visited was Box Canyon, which features a short but steep hike up to a bridge across the canyon, then through a tunnel leading to the Perimeter Trail.

There is also a trail that leads to falls slicing through the narrow canyon.

After our stay in Ouray, we moved on to Cortez, CO in the southwestern corner of the state. It serves as the gateway to a number of Native American archeological sites.

The most famous of these is Mesa Verde National Park, established in 1906 to, in the words of Theodore Roosevelt, "preserve the works of man." It was the first national park established for that purpose. However, the park is beautiful enough on its own that we think it would merit national park status even without the Native American ruins.

The air was exceptionally clear. We wondered whether COVID restrictions were contributing to this, since you would expect the air to be less clear in the summer. We could easily see 70-80 miles in all directions, including Shiprock in New Mexico, which was 50 miles away.

Shiprock

We were also intrigued by the multi-colored clouds at midday (not sunset).

Several times during our visit we passed through fire areas. Seventy percent of the park has burned in various fires since it was first established 114 years ago.

Mesa Verde is most famous for its Native American cliff dwellings, and the most famous of those is Cliff Palace.

When we last visited Mesa Verde about 21 years ago with our kids, you were able to tour the Cliff Palace ruins, which had been home to over 100 people in the 1200s. However, due to COVID, none of the cliff dwellings could be visited - only viewed from a distance.

There are a significant number of cliff dwellings in the park, both large and small.

The Ancestral Puebloans lived in Mesa Verde from about 500 AD to 1300 AD. They spent much of that time living on top of the mesa, and only about the last 100 years building and living in cliff dwellings. There are over 4,000 archeological sites in the park, about 600 of which are cliff dwellings.

There is a rim loop drive providing a historical look at the development on the mesa. First, people lived in pit houses, dug partly underground (to keep warm in winter and cool in summer). The Park Service has put covers over some of the structures to protect them from the elements.

Then small villages were built. Many of these had one story homes, as well as community "kivas" used for worship and group activities.

You could see the building techniques evolve over time from stacked stone to crafted rock walls almost 3 feet thick with a mud-based mortar and, at one time, covered in stucco. The ancient builders used only stone tools to shape the rocks to stack securely.

There was also a large Sun Temple (about 200 feet by 100 feet) built in the 1200s, about the time the people moved down into cliff dwellings.

Another day we visited two National Monuments preserving more Ancestral Puebloan ruins.

The Canyons of the Ancients National Monument is managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). Many of the sites are just piles of rubble, but there are a few preserved sites. We visited Lowry Pueblo, which had a fairly large building housing multiple families.

Lowry also had a very large ceremonial kiva that was probably used not only by the locals but also by other Ancestral Puebloans in the Four Corner area.

We then drove to Hovenweep National Monument, in Utah right over the border from Colorado, which had a number of well-preserved structures sitting on the rim of Hovenweep Canyon. In a loop hike of about two miles from the visitor center, we were able to view almost a dozen towers and other structures.

And so we ended our six week visit to Colorado. We very much enjoyed our time in the state, and vowed to come back in the future.

It was time to begin moving north again, starting with a return visit to Moab, Utah, where we'd spent the Memorial Day weekend in 2019. More about Moab in our next blog entry.