Colorado: Mesa Verde National Park

While planning our Southwestern vacation, we knew we wanted to visit Colorado. Neither of us had ever been there before, so we wanted to spend some time hiking and checking out the ancient cliff dwellings. One interesting tidbit is Mesa Verde is the first national park created to preserve the works of man, all other parks up until its creation were made to protect nature. Pretty interesting isn't it?

Four Corners

Normally, I pride myself on taking well thought out, and researched vacations. I like to seek out great local restaurants to eat at or locally made shops to visit, but since Four Corners was on my list of places to visit and we were passing through anyways, it seemed like a shame to miss.

Heading to the Southwest!

After much deliberation on where to vacation (our top choices were: Amsterdam, New Zealand and Kauai) we finally decided on hiking our way through the Southwest- completely random I know! We found inexpensive flights to Las Vegas and then made our way through Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and then Arizona. This was the first time we have taken a ten day vacation with the sole purpose to hike and visit National Parks.

By the end of our road trip I realized we had nothing in the way of souvenirs besides post cards because all we had done was hike, eat, sleep, drive and then repeat. Cameron and I have been fortunate enough to go on some epic vacations over the years, so this simple vacation was embarked upon with low expectations, which oftentimes equates to more fun. While I sift through the thousand or so photos I took, here are just a few to give you a taste of the Southwest through our eyes.