Day 9 (July 12): "You think you have it tough?" You could have lived in Cliff Palace.

Total Driving Distance: 79.6 miles (trip total: 3,121.8 miles)

States Traveled To: Colorado

Main Activity: Mesa Verde National Park

Before we went to sleep on July 11, we drove a couple hundred miles to Cortez, Colorado, the closest city to Mesa Verde National Park and about 40 miles from Four Corners. When we reached Cortez, we tried to find a good place to eat, which was hard to do at 11 at night, so Denny's it was. We then had to decide where we

were going to sleep that night. My plan was to check out the campgrounds in the National Park and see if there was anything available, or head to a nearby KOA and do night registration there. The Park turned out to be kinda creepy at night with no lights and the sign at the entrance said it was 15 miles to the campground, so we turned around and headed for the KOA.

The next morning we searched for a place to get a decent breakfast. The GPS pointed us in the direction of a place called Pipp's Cafe, which was closed. This turned out to be a good thing, because we found a place down the road called the Spruce Tree Coffeehouse. The Spruce Tree used to be someone's house. There was a kitchen that was the actual coffeeshop, where the coffee and bagels were made. The rest of the rooms were full of small tables and comfortable chairs. Bookshelves lined the walls, full of used books and dvds for sale. There was a back porch if you needed to get some fresh air. We ordered two everything bagels and a couple cups of Guatemalan coffee. It was by far the best food and coffee we had had on the trip so far.

We drove to the way-less-creepy-in-the-daytime Mesa Verde National Park and headed for the Visitors Center. There are about 10 or so different cliff dwellings you can visit, with about five of them having ranger-guided tours (the others you can visit on your own). We signed up for the Balcony House and Cliff Palace tours, the two most popular dwellings.

The Balcony House tour was first. According to the information booklet, the Balcony House tour is the most challenging ranger-led tour. It involved "climbing a 32-foot ladder, crawling through a 12 ft-long tunnel, and climbing up a 60 ft open cliff face with stone steps and two 10 ft ladders to exit the site." The tour started with a steep walk down a stone staircase that had been built into the cliffs. We then had to climb the 32-ft ladder up to the dwelling. Before we climbed, our park ranger Rachel gave a little pep-talk in which she informed us that she is deathly afraid of heights.

"No one is allowed to talk to me while I'm climbing the ladder. Seriously. This is the only part of the tour where I get freaked out, so no one can talk to me while I am climbing." The ladder honestly did not look that scary, but her speech made everyone nervous and wonder why Rachel became a park ranger at a Park full of cliff dwellings.

No one talked to Rachel while she was climbing and she did indeed make it to the top. So did the rest of us. We then had to squeeze through a tight tunnel to get to the actual dwelling. Balcony House was awesome. The balcony itself was pretty small (in the picture below, the balcony is all the way on the right, where the lady is ducking), but the rest of the dwelling was huge.

Rachel led us over to a kiva, a big hole in the ground where the ancestral Puebloans lived. Back in the 1200s when the Puebloans lived there, the kivas were covered with a roof, but the ones we saw had been uncovered so we could see inside them. There was a hole in the bottom, which I told Liz must be their bathroom or something to do with a draining system. "You see that hole in the bottom? It was called a sipapu, and it was the most sacred thing in the world to them, a symbol of their religion. To them it was their origin story. It was the hole that they came through to enter the world and the hole that they would go through when they died to enter the underworld." Their bathroom, it turned out, was going over the side of the cliff.

To exit the Balcony House tour, we had to crawl through the 6-ft tunnel tunnel which was actually sort of hard to get through. The woman behind us almost had a panic attack getting through the tunnel. The ladders and stairs we had to climb after the tunnel didn't help.

We had about thirty minutes to burn before our tour at the largest cliff dwelling, Cliff Palace, began. We spent some time looking through the museum near the Visitors Center, where we saw a girl bang her head on a glass display case attempting to get a closer look at a Puebloan pot.

The Cliff Palace tour was especially cool because you got a great view of the entire dwelling before the tour began.

During the tour, most of what we heard we had already learned from the Balcony House tour, but Cliff Palace was a cooler dwelling. We got to see some cliff paintings and a food storage area. Our park ranger was a little different from Rachel, he put a sort of "take care of the earth" spin on his tour. He also asked us to imagine life through the eyes of an ancestral Puebloan living in Cliff Palace. "You think you have it tough? Next time you are mad because your favorite TV show isn't on or because you have to do a chore, just think about the lives of the ancestral Puebloans." Okay, in all honesty, I do not think it would have been too bad living the life of the ancestral Puebloans. I mean, they did live in a place called Cliff Palace. Aside from the drought that probably drove them off, I think I would have enjoyed life in the cliff dwellings. Nevertheless, our park ranger kept reminding us that the lives of the ancestral Puebloans truly sucked.

After the tour, we drove back to the KOA we had stayed at the night before. We stopped on the way at a Walmart to get some groceries. We then had a delicious Walmart meal at the picnic table of our tent site, then climbed into our comfortable room in the back of our van and watched Freaks and Geeks until we fell asleep.

We also got to see a cool rainbow after it rained!