A Colorado Vacation with Pictures
The Four Corners of the Wild West
with Ancient Indians, White Waters,
Silver Mines and Wild Animals.
 Our trip to Colorado and the Four Corners of the Wild West was even better than I could have imagined.
This summer we traveled to Southwest Colorado, the area called Four Corners, where the corners of four states, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado, all meet. It turned out to be a good destination.
Our first stop was the Mesa Verde, a high mountain top plateau which overlooks the canyons. Here the Anasazi Indians, the cliff dwelers, lived and built their stone homes inside giant natural caves. They also built large underground ceremonial rooms, called kivas, for community gatherings. The Anasazi occupied this strategic plateau from about 1000 AD to 1300 AD, and then, for reasons unknown, the tribe moved down below to the canyon. The cliff dwellings have been empty and undisturbed since then, over 700 years. Cowboys rediscovered the cliff dwellings around 1880. You can go down into a kiva by a wood ladder to get the feel of Indian life. The museum nearby has a nice video. On display are the artifacts of their daily life: ropes woven of yucca and human hair, tiny ears of dried corn, bread made of corn meal and saliva, stone knives, a pair of crutches, hide scrapers and willow baskets and gorgeous pottery decorated in black and white designs.
Returning from Mesa Verde, we stopped the car to watch a black bear. It climbed up to the road, crossed behind our car and disappeared down the opposite canyon.
In Moab, Utah, the Arches National Park, just two hours away, are some spectacular red sandstone rock formations. You can see the stone arches and windows, domes and spires and balanced rocks.
We took an afternoon to hike the San Juan mountains on an easy trail that brought us to a spectacular overlook. Here's where we saw a family of hawks swooping across the valley from their nest in a high pine. The wildflowers were all in bloom.
Durango is the nearest large city, if you rule out Dolores, Cicero and Mancus. In Durango we made time for shopping at all the artisan shops, the Chocolate Factory, the leather and jewelry shops. The variety of silver and turquoise jewelery is amazing. You can ride an antique train to Silverton, the cowboy silver mining town, for an exciting view of the Rockies. You can join a guided group for white water rafting on the Animus River.
Also in Durango, the Strater Hotel dates from cowboy times, and has all its original decor and architecture. This is where Louis Lamour stayed to write some of his cowboy novels. We had the best lunch in the Diamond Belle Saloon at the hotel. For evening entertainment, there's a barbecue dinner and show almost every night at the Bar D Ranch in Durango, with five talented musicians joking and singing the old cowboy songs. (A big bargain evening for $17.00). People come for the world-class fly fishing and hunting around Durango, too.
My New Year's resolution was to try new things this year. So I rode a horse for the first time. But, in all honesty, I must tell you that it wasn't really "riding." The trainer was leading the horse around while I sat in the saddle!
Most of the time we stayed near a little town called Mancus. Sometimes we saw peacocks and Chinese chickens wandering the gravel road. There were alpaca farms, llama farms, elk farms, lots of deer, horses and cattle galore. In bed one night, we listened to the howl of a coyote. Brillo the watch dog heard the coyote and began howling, too, as if he were one of the pack. During daytime, hummingbirds are all around. They are attracted to those red plastic hummingbird feeders, which many people hang up. Did you know that hummingbirds can't walk?
The blue Colorado sky is clear and close and wide open, with clouds drifting over the red mountain peaks. At sunset, the ribbons of brilliant color spread across the sky behind the Mesa Verde and the La Plata mountains. In the evening stillness, the stars shine brilliant across the sky, revealing the heavenly constellations you can never see in the city. It was everything a vacation should be.
Hope you are doing well, too. Wasn't this a glorious summer? As I used to say when I tucked my little one into bed, "More fun tomorrow."
Love, Jan
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Colorado Vacation Adventures. The Four Corners of the Wild West with ancient Indians, white waters, silver mines and wild animals. More, too, great games, funny jokes, famous quotes, free ecards, daily news, friends, horoscope at Surfer Sam!
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