Desert Living

After we left Yellowstone we headed south all the way to Mesa Verde National Park in Southern Colorado. Actually we took a quick detour for a night through a great little town called Lava Springs in Idaho because of the hot springs that were rumored to be some of the best in the world. They did not disappoint.

Every time that I have been to a hot spring in the past, I have hiked in to a spot in the woods, soaked in the springs, and left smelling like farts. These springs lacked the crucial ingredient for fart smell...sulfur. These were un-purified, crystal clear, steaming hot mineral springs that were pretty incredible. The whole town is piped into the spring runoff, so every hotel, every campground, every B and B, has some sort of soaking pool from the springs. The city also has a huge water park for the kiddies with water slides and a Olympic size swimming pool that apparently are all fed off of the springs as well. There is also a small river that runs through town that the spring feeds so the river water is actually fairly warm...and they have spots for you to access the river to float through town on an inner tube with a walking trail to get you back to the access points to do it all over again (it looked really fun). We went into the hot spring pools operated by the city that they say have 2.2 million gallons of spring water run through them ever day. I've never been to a “commercial” hot spring before but it was pretty nice. They were large pools with great gravel bottoms that were less hot as you soaked down the line of pools. The hottest pool was somewhere around 114 degrees and my favorite was around 102. Aaaaaahhhhhh...perfect! We ended up hanging out there for the day...and we didn't end up smelling like farts when we left.  It was just what the doctor ordered after our marathon hiking tour of Yellowstone.

After our little detour, we drove all the way down to Mesa Verde. Actually we took one more detour to now my second favorite store behind Winco Foods...Walmart. Besides being a place where you can get just about any kind of garbage you want for incredibly cheap, they were our home for a night. We stuck around a little bit too long at the hot springs and were pretty exhausted from cooking the last of our brain cells in the hot pools. As we were driving south through the middle of nowhere, exhaustion set in and there was no place to stay for the night. We remembered our talks with other RV'ers that have recommended Walmart as a great layover spot so we looked on our handy little smartphones, found out that we were 10 minutes away from a Walmart that was in the middle of nowhere, and 10 minutes later we were home for the night with our new neighbors of about 15 other RV's that had the same idea as us. We actually slept pretty well and picked up some cheap garbage from the store in the morning. Thanks Walmart.

After our visit with my newly second favorite store, we finally made it to Mesa Verde. If you don't know what this place is, feel free to look it up on the good ol' internet. It has the ancient cliff dwellings of the ancestral Pueblo peoples. It's really a cool place that I have always wanted to see so we drove a mere 20 some hours to see it...and we were glad we did. There are tons of the cliff dwellings that you can see from a distance if you drive around or hike to some overlooks, but if you want to get up close and personal and actually walk through the sites, you have to take a tour with a park ranger. I've never been much of a tour guy but I have to say that I really enjoy talking with our National Park Rangers. Just about every one of them that I have talked to has been incredibly helpful, knowledgeable, and insightful into the parks that they are working at.

So we take the 2 tours that are available with our friendly park rangers and they are great. We get the history, the insight, the why's and the how's of the dwellings...it was enthralling. We loved it...and we got to climb through a few of the cliff dwellings that the other poor suckers only got to see from an overlook. Fascinating!

After the 2 tours, we hiked through the rest of the park and called it a night. We were exhausted. We just got through a marathon at Yellowstone and we have hiked our brains out all summer while traveling by boat so we thought that we were in pretty good hiking shape. Mesa Verde kicked our butts. The tours claimed to be “strenuous”. They told us “you will be hiking about a mile and will lose and gain a couple hundred feet of elevation.” “We can do that in our sleep!” we said...apparently not. It was tough. After the first tour, we gasped for air and we were disgusting sweaty messes. We hiked all the way up to around 10,000 feet at Yellowstone and I had a bit of a tough time but it was nothing like this. Something about the elevation and the heat got to us. Mesa Verde is up between 7,000 and 8,000 feet which is much lower than heights we got to in Yellowstone...but it was H-O-T!!! It was in the mid 90's and with the combination of the lower oxygen at the upper altitudes and the heat, we struggled. We did make it out alive (barely) and have moved on from Mesa Verde with a newly found knowledge and respect for the people that built and inhabited the cliff dwellings. It was an interesting place that we were really glad we saw and experienced.

Cliff Palace

We are now near Moab Utah camping in the desert near the Needles at Canyonlands National Park. This place is beautiful. Red rock walls and incredible rock formations are surrounding us. There are lizards scurrying around through the sand. There are surprisingly green trees for being in the middle of the desert. We just got back from a little nature hike through the desert with a book telling us about the different plants that we are looking at (this is one of Brenda's favorite activities...identifying plants and what we can use the plants for...interesting sometimes...incredibly boring other times...luckily for me this time it was interesting since this is new terrain for us). We love it here and it is our home for the night...possibly 2 or 3 nights since we have nowhere else to be. We are going to finally try to slow down a bit and soak in our surroundings...something we haven't been able to accomplish yet but we are trying. We really have nowhere to be and we love it here so why not try a little harder to relax. It's a totally different scenery than we are used to, the weather is hot and sunny, we have a camper full of food and water, and there is no one around. It's perfect.

Our new backyard for a couple of days...with our home on wheels on the side.