Mesa Verde National Park is unusual in the National Park Service in that it is primarily about an archeological record, particularly that of the Ancestral Pueblo people. This World Heritage Site contains some of the best preserved sites of how residents of these lands lived, particularly from approximately 700 to 1300 CE. The Far View lodge is a hotel inside Mesa Verde National Park which also happens to offer Tesla Destination Charging. It was the easiest way to take tours of this area. Mesa Verde is actually misnamed: it's actually slanted south so it isn't a mesa. At over 8000 feet elevation, the weather is relatively cool on this high cuesta.

We spent two nights here, so our use of the car was limited to accessing nearby trailheads and vistas after lunch.

In the morning, the kids and I took the "700-year tour", a guided bus and hiking tour highlighting the 700 years before the Ancient Puebloans abandoned this region for, around 1300, more fertile lands. The tour began with explaining and showing how they made use of the limited resources around to build and live in their earliest pueblos. While these evolved, they developed kivas for spiritual ceremonies but also other community gatherings. At first these were located on open land, but more advanced use of fire allowed the use of bricks so that these structures could become more sturdy. Eventually multistory structures became possible.

The highlight of the tour was their largest construction in North America built into the side of a cliff: Cliff Palace. It contains 23 kivas and 150 rooms, apparently occupied by hundreds of people, indicating support by a substantial farming and trading community in the area. Great speculation surrounds the purpose of building such a large structure. Given that it is certainly impressive and unusual to modern people today, but back then when one normally lives in an isolated pueblo sunken into the ground, it surely must have made an impression on visitors.