We woke up in Farmington, New Mexico and headed out to the Aztec Ruins National Monument. We walked around the half mile trail and it was a self guided tour. Ryan stepped up and read from the booklet they gave us, but I'm pretty sure he made up a bunch of shit. The ruins are nine hundred years old and most of the original structures are still there. We were able to walk through a lot of the rooms which was really cool. The one thing I was NOT happy about was that they were out of patches. I even spoke with woman at the register and she asked for my email so she could let me know when they were in so I could order one. I"m still waiting for that email and it is the only patch that I'm missing from our trip. Now that I'm an avid patch collector, it is driving me crazy that I don't have a complete set of our trip.
Our next stop was the Four Corners National Monument were you can be in Utah, Colorado, New New Mexico and Arizona all at the same time. There were a lot of Native American vendors there with some beautiful things for sale like paintings and jewelry.
Our final stop of the day was Mesa Verde in Colorado and it was gorgeous! There are forty miles of roads that have almost five thousand archeological sites and six hundred cliff dwelling, so there was lot to see! We were lucky enough to get tickets for a guided tour of the most impressive dwelling. We had a few hours before the tour started so we drive around and drove up to over right thousand feet. While we were driving up we heard a lot of crackling in the back of the car. Our Cheetos bags were blowing up like a balloon because of the elevation change.
Ryan had told us a bit about the tour but as the ranger started explaining exactly what we were in for, I got a bit nervous. He explained there was a bunch of stairs (fine), a tunnel we had to crawl through that was wide of the ranger's hat (a little concerning because I'm not known for having slender hips) and the thirty two foot ladder. Now, I'm not afraid of heights at all, so I didn't think anything of it. I also under estimated how much thirty two feet actually was. From far away, the ladder didn't look bad at all because it looked like it was at an angle. As we got closer to the ladder, the more nervous I got because it wasn't at an angle at all. The ladder itself was very smooth and felt slippery to me. There were no divots or any traction on the rungs. As I started to climb, I began to sweat A LOT. The ranger kept saying to not look down and keep looking up. I felt my palms start to start to sweat and was nervous that they would slip because the rungs were so smooth. It felt like it took hours to get up it, but it was less than ten minutes. Once I got to the top, I let out a huge breathe of relief. I looked over and saw people going up a ladder and it didn't register until I got up to it, that is was another f-ing ladder that we had to go up to get out of the dwellings. The dwelling was amazing and we walked through a couple rooms. I climbed the last ladder nervously and finally made it to the top. Despite nearly pissing myself, I'm glad I did it. Our pictures honestly don't do it justice.
We ate at a great Mexican restaurant for dinner that had the best queso dip I've ever had. After eating, we checked into our hotel and relaxed. I realized that I forgot something in our car so Matt and I walked out in the dark to the parking lot. As I was looking in the car, we heard a weird rattling sound. We realized that it was probably a rattle snake under a car and we got the hell out of there.
After that scare, we headed up to our room for the night. We were looking forward to the next day because we were going to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon!
National Park Service: https://www.nps.gov
Passport to your National Parks: https://www.eparks.com
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