Written by: Shotgun Rider (ChatGPT).
Note: This entire post, including the title, all images, and the accompanying Instagram post, were all generated entirely by AI. Only this paragraph is human :)
When I pulled into Mesa Verde RV Resort just after sunset on a crisp April evening, I didn’t know yet that my neighbors would be pitching my tent before I could even finish declining their offers of help.
Tom, Annette, Walter, and Janice — two older couples on either side of my tent site — made it a group effort without waiting for permission. Their spontaneous kindness felt fitting somehow, like a prelude to the lessons Mesa Verde would offer in the days ahead.
The night was cold. The wind tugged at the guy ropes Tom had tightened with a practiced hand, and by morning the familiar sag of a deflated air mattress pressed against my back. It wasn’t the most comfortable start — but in hindsight, it set the tone. Out here, resilience wasn’t a heroic effort. It was simply the quiet decision to keep going.
The drive into Mesa Verde National Park was beautiful in the clear morning light. The road twisted and climbed steadily, and the GPS audio tour I’d downloaded filled the car with stories of ancestral ingenuity and adaptation.
At Knife’s Edge viewpoint, I paused to imagine what it had once been like when a precarious road was the only thread tying the mesas to the outside world.
By noon, I found myself at the Spruce Tree Lodge, lingering over the museum’s exhibits.
The ancient pit homes and cliff dwellings, the delicate pottery, the finely wrought beads — they all told stories of patience, creativity, and community.
There was one exhibit that caught me more sharply than the others: a collection of pottery sherds returned by visitors who had once taken them home in ignorance or impulse, later sending them back with notes of guilt and regret. Many of the letters were from Native Americans, referring to the Ancestral Puebloans as “our ancestors.”
As I stood reading, two women approached.
One, younger, pointed to the display.
“I have one of those,” she said casually. “And one of those. And one kinda like that one, but bigger.”
The older woman hesitated, then said, “Yeah, but aren’t you supposed to give them back?”
The younger woman shrugged. “Oh, I found them in random places. There are so many anyway.”
I stayed silent.
Not from agreement — from a strange shyness, a momentary inability to bridge the gap between feeling something strongly and acting on it.
But the moment lingered with me, a quiet reminder that reverence isn’t automatic. It’s a choice, one we make — or don’t — every day.
After a lunch of a Mesa Verde Taco — fry bread piled high with local ingredients — I set off to explore the loops that showcase the park’s top sites and cliff palaces.
The land unrolled before me in warm, muted colors: sandstone cliffs, piñon pines, sagebrush stirred by the wind.
I didn’t have a ticket for a ranger-led tour (they hadn’t started for the season yet), but my binoculars brought the distant dwellings closer.
Cliff Palace. Balcony House. Spruce Tree House.
Each structure was a testament not just to ingenuity, but to stubborn, generational effort: building stone by stone, room by room, adjusting and refining over centuries.
Square Tower House captured me most. Rising four stories against the cliffside, it seemed improbably elegant — a vertical dream nested in rock.
There was something so alive about it, even now. Like the wind threading through its windows still carried the memory of children’s laughter, of hands smoothing adobe walls.
One conversation during the drive stayed with me, though not for the reasons its speaker probably intended.
At one overlook, a man struck up conversation, friendly enough.
But when I mentioned I was traveling alone, he frowned and said, “I’m sorry.”
I wasn’t sorry at all.
Traveling alone had given me freedom — freedom to move at my own pace, to listen to my own rhythms, to linger where I felt called and move on when I was ready.
It made me reflect: much like the ancient communities of Mesa Verde, whose survival depended on collective strength, today’s society can sometimes misunderstand individuality.
Yet both — community and independence — have their place.
Both are needed to build something lasting.
More than anything, Mesa Verde made me think about persistence.
At the museum, I learned how early pottery attempts often cracked because the makers hadn’t yet discovered tempering.
Imagine that: laboring over a beautiful vessel, firing it — only to watch it fracture.
And trying again. And again. Experimenting with different materials until one day, it held.
It wasn’t pure brilliance that built Mesa Verde.
It was patience.
It was persistence.
It was the quiet, relentless refusal to give up — even when the road ahead wasn’t clear, even when success wasn’t guaranteed.
That spirit is something I think we risk losing in a world used to instant results.
But walking through Mesa Verde, looking out over the cliff dwellings framed by sun and shadow, I felt it still stirring.
Not as a museum relic, but as a living challenge:
Keep trying. Keep building. Keep believing it’s possible.
Roamward Bound 