Colorado Times: The Spruce Tree House at Mesa Verde. This is the first place we really started to encounter hordes of tourists. Being one of so many does a lot to remove the specialness of seeing a place. In fact, I'm going to express the rate opinion here--tourism is ruining our national treasures. No longer is vacation about packing the family in the car and sharing an adventure. It's about fighting for elbow room at the fence lines to see the view you've driven for hours to see. You're not sharing the space with other families, but with loads and loads of tour buses vomiting out hundreds of ill-prepared tourists at a time. This was my biggest disappoint of the trip. Everywhere we went we encountered this unfortunate overcrowding of our precious natural landmarks. I'm thankful to the park services for doing a decent job of corralling the crowds and managing the resources decently. by run2themountains