Pokin had wanted Mesa Verde since Arches.
Nicholas had been saying no since Arches. Too out of the way.
Then we woke up in Farmington and somebody looked at a map. From Moab it was out of the way. From Farmington it was an hour and a half.
None of us could say when we would next be in this corner of the country, which is how a detour gets approved. We turned north.
The Visitor Centre#
First stop was the visitor centre, and it was the nicest visitor centre any of us had ever been in.
That is not a small claim. We have been in a lot of visitor centres on this trip. It is where the mugs live.
It turns out there is a reason. It is not really a visitor centre. It is the Mesa Verde Visitor and Research Center, it opened in 2012, and the back of the building is where the park keeps its archives and its museum collection. More than three million objects. They built the whole thing to LEED Platinum, which is the top grade you can get for a green building.
So the lobby is nice because it is the front door to a vault. I approve of this. Every building with a vault in it should have a lobby like that.
Booked Up#
The tours were booked. All of them.
Mesa Verde is the cliff dwelling park. The point is going down into them with a ranger, and you are meant to book that ahead, and we had decided to come here that morning.
So, a debate. The museum is an hour’s drive in from the entrance. Without a tour, there would be nothing to do at the end of it except look.
We went anyway, for the same reason we came at all. When are we ever going to be back here?
Look, Don’t Touch#
At the end of the drive is the Chapin Mesa museum, and below it, tucked under a cliff, is Spruce Tree House.
It was built somewhere between 1200 and 1280. Around 130 rooms and eight kivas, stacked into an alcove in the canyon wall, with the cliff itself for a roof.
The roof is the problem. Rock keeps falling off it, so Spruce Tree House has been closed since 2015. Nobody goes in. Not with a ticket, not with a ranger, not at all.
Which means all we could do was look down.
Which is also all anyone else could do. We had no tour booked, and it made no difference whatsoever. For once we were exactly as important as everybody else, and I would like that to never happen again.
A roof made of cliff. That was the selling point for eight hundred years, and now it is the reason for the fence.
It seemed interesting. It was a nice spot. It was also still too hot for a proper hike, and we were running behind.
So we did what we had actually come here to do. Nicholas bought a mug.
Then we drove off.
There is a postscript to this. According to his mom, Nicholas has been to Mesa Verde before. As a kid, on a family road trip. He drove in, looked down at the cliff dwellings from above, and left.
He has no memory of it whatsoever.
So all that worrying about when we would ever be back here, and the answer was that he already had been, and it did not take. This time he has a mug. That should help.
Not Camping#
There had been talk of camping near the park that night. Then we looked at the sky.
Nobody camped. I made sure of it, in the sense that I agreed very loudly with whoever said no first.
Onwards, Homewards#
And that was the road trip.
From here it was a race. Time for Nicholas to go to work.
We stopped in Kanab. The next day we drove through Zion, which we have done properly plenty of times already, so this time we were not there to see anything. We were there for the mug.
Zion did not care what we were there for. It was packed. There was not a single parking spot anywhere.
So Nicholas stayed at the wheel, Pokin hopped out, ran in, came back with the goods, and we kept going. We did not stop at Zion. Technically Pokin did.
Then home.
Seven mugs. The trip was over. The collection, it turns out, was not.