Mesa Verde and Silverton

The last two days have been filled with running around and seeing as much as we can. Thursday we headed to Mesa Verde amazing!

The Long House ...... took a guided tour through it

When we woke up there was a huge thunder storm... lightning and thunder and lots of rain.... I took a video... not sure how it turned out yet...if it is any good I will be posting it on youtube.....as we took off for Mesa verde the rain kept coming.. and the thunder and lighting.. thought for sure we would be seeing the sights in the pouring rain... oh well.. we are from Washington and use to that... but.. the closer we got to the park the more it cleared up.... the day was warm... but not too hot.. well it stayed below 90. I did get a bit of a sun burn.. which mostly pissed me off.. since I was the one being so careful ( I thought ) to put on sun block.. and lecturing the kids... turns out I missed a spot :(

Cliff Palace .............. another guided tour.

I was really suprised at how green everything was... in a lot of the photos I had looked at everything was brown.. even with snow on it... so I was so happy to see so much green. We did two of the three guided tours... both were amazing... you go straight down 100+ feet... walk through the ruins and then straight back up... most of the up is on wooden ladders. I had spent some time in the weeks before vacation.. walking straight up hill on the treadmill... trying to get ready for this sort of thing... but.. I had not practiced with the heat and the altitude and had not practiced stairs... this about killed me.. but I did it :)

The short ( 8 feet high ) ladders.

Yesterday we drove up to Silverton... and fell in love... with everything between Durango and Silverton and beyond. It is only 40 miles from our campsite to Silverton but it took us almost 2 hours. We ended up taking some side road.. totally 4x4ing along a river and into the woods and some beautiful meadows.. for a cache.

There is a cache down there.. had to drive around and 4x4 to get it:)

Oh and by the way.. we were in a rental 4x4 and not in the motor home for this part :) While we were there we saw a beautiful wolf... yes we took photos...will have some up later on flickr. I noticed so many camp sites...the kind where you just pull out into the field or under a tree along the river.... little rock circle fireplaces... but the coolest thing I noticed... was NO garbage.. any where... these camp sites were so clean... You never see this anywhere in Washington... Everywhere we have gone in Colorado you can feel and see a respect for the area. ( I also learned there is a highly enforced 1,ooo dollar fine for littering in the state....Yay! )

The Durango to Silverton Narrow Gauge Steam Train

We hung out in town for a bit... so much to see and so little time... we have already decided we are coming back and spending at least a week just in Silverton.. so much to do there... lots of mines to explore... and so many trails.. and the wildlife... it is all amazing... the town itself could take three days to explore... it is an old mining town with a train station.. and it has not been built up for tourist.. it has.. but the bones of it are all there because it is what it was.. and what it still is... it was not built to look like a town out of an old west movie... it is an old west movie.. and the people are so polite and calm and nice... it was relaxing and exciting all at the same time.


We had lunch at a wonderful BBQ place... called Thee pits again great food and wonderful service... the link is for their other restraunt... they just opened the one in Silverton not too long ago.. they were even featured on Diners Drive ins and Dives.. on the food network. Then we walked around town.. checked out the train depot and found a couple of caches.

There was a cache in this little park area.. was a bit hard to find without being muggled

A guy sitting outside the reastraunt ( who worked there ) had told us about a ghost town just outside of town a few miles... so off we headed.. down a dirt road for about 12 miles... it was one of the coolest things.. an old mining town.. the buildings still there... there is a self guided map you can get and you can walk through the buildings and read about each one... it was fun.

Animas Forks.... founded 1880 ...elevation 11,160

There was also a cache out behind town near an opening to a mine shaft... it was a lot of fun. On the way back to town we saw a family of moose playing in a field where the river had made a marshy area. we stopped and spent about 30 minutes just taking photos of the moose. If you know us you know we LOVE moose... our whole home has the log cabin feel based on a lot of moose things. We can't wait to download the photos and see what we got.

Moose family

Now we are back at camp and it is Saturday morning.. we are packing up and getting ready to take off for Colorado Springs...then after that we start the trek home.