Who doesn’t want to get trapped in a cliff dwelling by lightning then thunder 6 seconds later? It was awesome! We had 3 rangers and an ancient dwelling in the coolest cave to protect us. What I loved: hiking down over a mile from the mesa top to find this house. You can’t see it from the road, like so many of these cliff dwellings, they are ‘off the beaten path’. Emerson said she loved “imagining what life was like in this cave so high on a cliff” in the 1200s. She asked the rangers lots of excellent questions including “could they use horses in the canyon? Did they have blankets? Did they have doctors or healers? Did families share a kitchen? Did they fall off the cliffs?” We all learned a ton!

Maddy loved being told we had to stay in the cliff house as the thunder boomed around us. Did you know that the sand stone can conduct electricity? I asked Mat what he loved and he said standing in that cliff house was his “favorite part of the trip so far”. It was pretty amazing to hike down steep switchbacks and finally get a glimpse of the house. This ruin had 150 rooms and 21 kivas (underground circular rooms) and was home to a community of roughly 150 Ancestral Pueblo people. We got to climb 2 big wooden ladders, but if you looked up you could see so many more “rooms” high above us that seem impossible to reach! Mat loved it enough to hike another mile in the hot mid-day sun to also see Step House.

After the lightning and thunder subsided we hiked back to the car for the 20+ mile drive through the winding cliff roads out of the park when the skies finally opened up and down poured on us! It made for an exciting drive down. For being in desert areas we have seen a lot of storms! The kids giggled the whole way down.

It was almost 6pm before we left Colorado for Moab, Utah. We did stop to do some tire maintenance (hoping once we get to MT we can address the one tire that has a very slow leak), have a quick dinner, and then our first evening drive of the trip, an easy 2 hours. It was beautiful to see the changing landscapes in the late afternoon light, we loved it.

Utah is a brand new state for all 4 of us! And Moab is just as beautiful as advertised. Our campground: the Canyonlands RV Resort has the weirdest entrance between a gas station and a billboard but it’s a cozy place to call home for the next 4 nights. Our first “late arrival” but we had no trouble setting up camp and Murphy made fast friends as always.

Saturday, July 31, 2021