Day 3: Montrose to Mesa Verde and back

Miles traveled: 288

We met Shadow and had to give him all the scritches a good boy deserves.

We had a destination of Mesa Verde National Park and had three route options. We decided we would play it by ear on how we get there.

We knew we’d be in the mountains but not these mountains.

One of our favored options had road closures and the other added an hour, so the roads chose CO 145 for us and we just had our jaws on the ground.

The red rock is called Telluride Conglomorate. Mom loved it so much and it kept us company most of the day. It was formed under water during the Jurassic period.

We went up into the San Juan Mountains that are part of the Rockies and formed by volcanos 33-23 million years ago.

The mountain on the left is called Sunshine Mountain and I love her very much.

Chips and salsa and margaritas in Delores.

We spotted the Delores Dragon in the wild with two of her pups.

We made it to Mesa Verde, which are Native cliff dwellings, but did not have time to actually appreciate and give the proper respect to them. We will come back and do this park in another road trip.

We headed back up 145 because we wanted to see if we missed any views but rain put the kibosh on that. We did run in to a traffic jam we first learned about on our road trip in Ireland in 2002. SHEEP! 🐏🐏