Dream Science Trips | Discovery Channel Young Scientist Challenge

Hello! My name is Iftin Abshir and I was chosen as the Team Gray spokesperson to tell you about our cool trip to Mesa Verde National Park, where we learned so much about archaeology and history.
It was great to reunite with everyone. On my left is Elijah, and on my right is Alex. In this photo, we are standing at Far View Lodge, where you could see all the way to Albuquerque at night!
On our first day in the park, we met Tami—our excellent ranger who taught us about the ancient people who lived at Mesa Verde.
Our first stop was Cliff Palace, one of the largest and most recognized cliff dwellings. There were lots of stairs to climb down into and out of the site. We saw the ancient hand and toe holes that were used by Ancestral Puebloans long before the National Park Service created steps!
Here's the gorgeous view from the Cliff Palace trailhead of the surrounding mesas.
Then we went to Balcony House. It was fun because you had to climb up a very tall, double-wide ladder to get up into the house.
We even climbed through a small tunnel and then up more ladders to get out.
It was great and so was the view from up there. Tami told us about how Balcony House used to be a ceremonial dwelling that had many symbols and held great importance in the peoples' religion.
A tram took us to the Long House trailhead, where we made our way to Long House. It was just Tami and our group—and the ravens that live there. Kind of eerie!
Long House was big and open, and we liked the layout of it better than the other dwellings we had seen. Good acoustics, too! It was just another dwelling, but Tami said it was probably used for ceremonies because it had a large dance plaza in the center.
On our second day, we went early in the morning to Spruce Tree House, which was quite deserted. It was the dwelling used mostly for living. Joel, one of the park archaeologists, showed us around and let us go behind the rope barriers and into the houses where most people never get to go.
Then Kay Barnett, the head archaeologist, showed up and we got to go into a towerlike structure. Here she is showing Alex one of the archaeological maps. The archaeologists there create hand-drawn maps of all the structures. We helped the archaeologists by either measuring the rocks to be drawn or actually drawing them.
Here's Alex climbing out of a kiva at Spruce Tree House.
This is looking down into a kiva that doesn't have its roof. The roof rested on the square pillars all the way around the kiva. You can see the fire pit, airshaft, air deflector, and secret passageway.
We got to observe the scanning process and actually started laser scanning with the people from Texas Tech University. I spend a big part of the afternoon telling tourists what we were doing!
Kay Barnett even took us to the Mesa Verde Archives, where we saw a lot of interesting records and artifacts.
On our last night, Alex set up his camera and took some great shots of the stars, nebulae, satellites, and stuff. We could see constellations that I previously had only seen pictures of in books. It was a wonderful night with wonderful company!
It was a perfect end to a perfect trip!