Sept 26 Mesa Verde

Today we went to view the cliff houses closer to the Farview Lodge.  We had been unable to get tour tickets for the Long House, so we settled for hiking to view points.  There are ranger led hikes to Long House and Balcony House.  

This is Balcony House.  Note the ladders in the bottom right -- that's part of the tour.  Not visible in this photo is a very narrow passageway that required crawling the last time we were here.  And two more ladders off to the left.  We decided not to get tickets for a ranger tour here.

 Here's the Balcony House in situ.  We're viewing this from the Soda Canyon Overlook, a hike of about 1.5 miles roundtrip.

 Soda Canyon

 Soda Canyon has a few other houses not accessible.

 You can see a tour group going up the first set of ladders.

 Pinon pine

 More ruins

 Square Tower House

 Finally, we visit the Cliff Palace area, which has many houses surrounding the central palace.

 And this is Cliff Palace.  NPS: " It is thought that Cliff Palace was a social, administrative site with high ceremonial usage."  It has 150 rooms and was built and occupied 1192-1260 CE.

 On the mesa across Cliff Palace is the Sun Temple. 

 An exotic car club was rallying across the Southwest, and they were spending the night in Mesa Verde.  They were all drinking on the lounge deck when we had our dinner there.  In the picture below, one of the cars is ours and driven from Florida. (Note the Porsche in the background -- there were lots of them around.)