Monday, August 10, 2009

From on high

BOOM! And just like that the cooling, embracing, jagged peaks that had been our constant companions for the last week are gone. We wind our way down from passes cold and clear, sprinkled with wildflowers and hardy whisper pine, down and back into the warm and dry world of real summer.We leave the mountains with a pang of regret. Its like nothing we have in Australia, and it would be a completely new experience to see them in winter. A new, and COLD experience.

The large towns seem to leave the real mountains alone... The high passes and valleys, the meadows and jagged rock seem to drive them off, so when we get back to "solid ground" in the town of Durango its back to traffic lights, traffic snarls, fast food joints and supermarkets that actually have what you need at a price you can afford... so its bittersweet... its also *noticably* warmer...

After stocking up on camping food (cheerios and chocolate chip cookies) we head back towards the L.A. side of the street and the ancient cliff dwellings of mesa verde. They cliff dwellings were built between about 800 and 1200 A.D. and are pretty impressive (not so much the buildings themselves - hey, Rome came a long way before these huts) but for their location and for the fact that this is a bloody dry and hot place, and *somehow* these tenacious people managed to farm and thrive here, on the dry plateau for over 500 years, moving on only when the soil became nutrient depleted or fire fuel bacme too rare (the trees grow SLOW here)...

Did I mention their location too? Location location location... this is frightening stuff for a guy who's used to walking 5 minutes home from the bus and the hardest thing to negotiate is the steps to the front door. These amazing villages cling to alcoves far up canyon walls, the inhabitants having to climb by toeholds in the cliff up to the mesa top to do their days work and them scurry back down again (the joke goes that scientiest worked out the leasing cause of death here was sleepwalking...). Lord knows I had enough trouble getting down to them - even with all the ladders and chains the NPS has put in. But its stunning here. It's a brilliant place to visit, and another of those points on the map that I would look at and wonder what it was like... now I know... I'm glad I don't have to live halfway down a cliff, but I'm amazed at what we saw, and thankful for the priviledge of seeing it.

We camped in the park, the high and cold end of the mesa. Being in a tent, and it being so cold helped me get over my nostalgia for the mountains. Outside at elevation at night is a chilly experience...

As the moon rose over the bluffs that ringed the scrubby campground the evening story teller shared the tale of the stars, of orion's belt, the bear, the buffalo, the eagle and the wolf, the earth and the air... (the totems of the compass in the medicine wheel) and the first story teller as related to her by the descendants of those who used to live so close by...