Cliff Palace

Today we drove up to Cliff Palace dwellings.  It is a 24 mile drive up and down and around and around very steep drop offs and cliffs.  I know what other RVers mean now when they say a road is a butt pucker.

We did see a couple of tour buses bigger than we were but other than those we were about as big as I would want to drive up there.  I was never out of second gear the whole way and at some points I was in first.  Using the gears properly takes a lot of the stress out of it.  They will maintain your speed without using the brakes.

The cliff dwellings were very interesting.  We took a ranger guide tour and heard a story that was mostly conjecture.  Nobody really knows much about this place.  They can only guess but it was still interesting.

We went through the museum which had many artifacts collected at the various sites around the park.

It was very cold again last night.  We had the heat on so we stayed toasty.  Deer came right up to our campsite to feed.  Darlie got a big thrill out of that.

Hiking up and down hills at 7000 feet takes its toll on us old folks.  We  live at sea level and aren't adapted to thin air.  The wind and dry weather also has my eyes very irritated.   Our generator doesn't want to run very well at this altitude either.  I had to adjust the carburetor this morning to get it to run.  It still needs a little tweaking.

We are headed back to our campsite to rest and relax for the rest of the day.  The National Park campground has many sites.  Most are dry campsites, however.  The sites with water and electric are reserved way in advance.  We don't mind dry camping.  We have water and our generator.  We may stay another day or move on.  Things are filling up for Memorial Day Weekend so we may not be able to find a campground.  If that turns out to be the case, we will just pull off somewhere and make camp there.