The first day we made it down to Mesa Verde, Colorado from our home in Mendon, Utah
Mesa Verde National Park was established in 1906 to preserve and interpret the archeological heritage of the Ancestral Pueblo people who made it their home for over 700 years, from 600 to 1300 CE. Today, the park protects nearly 5,000 known archeological sites, including 600 cliff dwellings. These sites are some of the most notable and best preserved in the United States.
The next day we took a train ride on the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad ( D&SNGRR); an old coal fired steam engine. The railroad runs 45 miles (72 km) from the Durango yard to Silverton, crossing the Animas River five times throughout the trip. Once trains reach Silverton and unload passengers, the train is turned on the wye, backs uptown to pick up returning passengers, and makes the trip back to Durango. One way scheduled trains take 3½ hours to run the 45 miles (72 km) each way, with a 2¼ hour layover in Silverton.
T next stop was the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge, locally known as the "Gorge Bridge" or the "High Bridge", is a steel deck arch bridge across the Rio Grande Gorge 10 miles northwest of Taos, New Mexico, United States. Roughly 600 ft above the Rio Grande, it is the tenth highest bridge in the United States.
In the same area as the bridge there is the Earthships. Earthships are homes/dwellings that combines passive solar architecture, thermal mass construction, renewable energy, integrated water systems that include indoor food growing, and the use of natural and recycled materials.
Then on to the Taos Pueblo. Taos Pueblo is an ancient pueblo belonging to a Taos-speaking Native American tribe of Puebloan people. It lies about 1 mile north of the modern city of Taos, New Mexico. The pueblos are considered to be one of the oldest continuously inhabited communities in the United States.
Now down to Albuquerque where the oldest daughter, Codi lives with her family on Kirkland AFB; husband Erik and son Bryce. Not only did we come to visit but also see the hot air balloon festival. We had tickets to go into the festival on Thursday night but due to high winds that brought a cool front in they canceled the Thursday evening events. We did get to see a balloon ascension the morning we left.
From Albuquerque we made another sojourn with the daughter further down into the southwest and saw Fort Sumner. It is the location of one of the first native american reservation in the U.S. It came to be called the Long Walk -- in the 1860s, more than 10,000 Navajos and Mescalero Apaches were forcibly marched to a desolate reservation in eastern New Mexico called Bosque Redondo. Nearly one-third of those interned there died of disease, exposure and hunger, held captive by the U.S. Army.
This was kind of depressing to me.
Next was Carlsbad Cavern! Carlsbad Caverns National Park is in the Chihuahuan Desert of southern New Mexico. It features more than 100 caves. The Natural Entrance is a path into the namesake Carlsbad Cavern. Stalactites cling to the roof of the Big Room, a huge underground chamber in the cavern.
And not to be left out was a couple of bike rides around the Albuquerque area with Erik. We rode part of the Paseo del Bosque Trial that goes from the north to the south edges of the metro area through the Rio Grande's cottonwood bosque (forest). We also rode around the Kirkland AFB and seen the Kirkland trestle. TLAS-I better known as Trestle, was the codename for a unique electromagnetic pulse (EMP) generation and testing apparatus built between 1972 and 1980 during the Cold War at Sandia National Laboratories near Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque.
