Mesa Verde--The Real Oboz Beginning

Mesa Verde

The next stop of our adventure were the cliff dwellings of the Mesa Verde National Park near Cortez, Colorado.  More spectacular scenery and more beautiful weather!  And this was the genesis of the Oboz blog idea.  In a spur of the moment idea, I had Donna sit next to me and we shot a photo of our boots with a scene from the park.  We decided to carry that theme throughout the rest of our vacation.

Here we are, our boots and some of the cliff dwellings of the Mesa Verde National Park.

The dwellings and communities built by the ancient people are incredible.  This area was inhabited by several thousand people back in its heyday.  There are guided tours you can take that will take you  down to the ruins.  Unfortunately we didn't have time to take one of the tours, but it was still an incredible experience seeing the ruins from the upper rims.

Who would have thought that they would have had high-rise apartments several hundred years ago?

When we arrived at the park, we toured the area in the daylight.  Then we went to nearby Cortez to check into the hotel and grab some dinner, then drove back up to the park for some awesome nighttime photography.

During our drive into the park during daylight, I spoke to a ranger and got an idea of a good place for night-time photography.  In this shot you can see the lights of Farmington, New Mexico on the horizon in the left.  The Milky Way is visible as the nearly vertical line that looks like clouds.  The nearly horizontal line segment through the Milky Way is the International Space Station.  It was silent as it went past, and it is a solid white line.  Had it been a jet, we would have heard the jet noise, and, more importantly, the red beacon and white strobe lights would have given a series of red and white dots along the path.

Here is another shot of the Milky way taken nearly straight up.