reaching below 20 F. We actually lucked out, as it turned out to be the last night of camping allowed for the season. The camping was considered "primitive," despite having a heated bathroom with flush toilets. You will know from my previous posts that this is fact quite luxurious! Mesa Verde was designated a National Park to preserve and protect a cultural site, rather than a natural one. Around 1,000 years ago the ancestors to the modern day Pueblo tribes lived at Mesa Verde in spectacular cliff dwellings they carved and built into the sandstone cliffs. Many people are familiar with the term Anasazi that used to be the common descriptor for these people, and I even remember learning about them in grade school in Arizona. It turns out that "Anasazi" is a Navajo word meaning something akin to "the strange ones," so it's no surprise that the ancestors of these people prefer the term Ancestral Puebloans instead! The next morning we headed over to the visitor center to buy our $3 tour tickets of the Cliff Palace Ruins. Our guide was Ranger Craig, an aging hippie who was very mellow, knowledgeable, and completely in tune to the cultural and spiritual significance of the site. He gave an informative, meaningful tour, and I was grateful we visited this National Park in the slow season. When I was a child we visited in the summer, and although all I remember is climbing down the fun ladder, apparently it becomes incredibly crowded