A growling alarm clock

Our alarm clock today was a bear or a wild boar or coyote, but probably something more gentle, like a deer or something [Andy – its was a freakin huge roaring bear!]. Anyway, there was some sort of wild animal outside the tent this morning that woke us. The dog was as scared as us and only showed her courage after the thing had clearly disappeared to look for food at the neighbor’s campsite.
Now that we’re all awake it’s time to check the domesticated animal into kennels so we can see the Cliff Dwellings at Mesa Verde. While we’re in town dropping off Josie, we carb-load at a lovely, local coffee shop and borrow their wifi.
Mesa Verde is beautiful and the park staff are really friendly. We check out a couple of the grand daddy sites with a tour guide first. The fun parts are climbing the ladders up to the sites in the cliffs and scrambling through tunnels to get out. The interesting part is not learning anything. No one knows much about the people that lived here or how they used the dwellings –or at least no one can agree on any theories. But, the sites are really impressive. We check out as many of the self guided sites as we can.
Tonight we discovered how spoiled we are. We arrive at the highest point in Mesa Verde just in time for a beautiful sunset and we don’t bother to turn our on our cameras or even stick around to enjoy the whole thing. We’re hot, tired and ready to turn in.
We’re not sure what the next few days will look like. We had a pleasant conversation with a park ranger last night who positively beamed when she talked about her home town in the Rocky Mountain National Park area. She may have helped us with our plans.