Mesa Verde Country website<\/a> on Monday, and Kirkpatrick said she expects the other two to go up within the next few days. Each podcast will provide a 30-minute audio tour of a different area of the county, complete with driving directions.<\/p>\nKirkpatrick said the Visitor Information Bureau hired a production company several months ago to record the audio tour narratives, but it took longer than she expected to put the podcasts online.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt ended up being quite intricate,\u201d she said. \u201cWe had to reconfigure the whole website to put it up \u2026 we used every bit of that $25,000.\u201d<\/p>\n
Now that the first audio tour is available, she said she\u2019s heard nothing but positive feedback.<\/p>\n
The tour starts at the Colorado Welcome Center in Cortez, then takes the visitor to the Cortez Cultural Center and Hawkins Preserve, through McElmo Canyon to the Guy Drew and Sutcliffe wineries, past the entrance to Canyons of the Ancients National Monument and finally to the Hovenweep National Monument. Narrators give brief lessons on the geological and cultural history of each stop on the tour.<\/p>\n
A Tuesday press release from Mesa Verde Country said the tour is \u201cversatile and designed to accompany travelers as they journey at their own pace.\u201d<\/p>\n
The other two audio tours will take visitors through archaeological sites like the Lowry Pueblo and explore the areas around Mancos and Dolores. All three will be compatible with iPhones, Androids and any other device that can download audio files, Kirkpatrick said.<\/p>\n
Many hours of research and planning went into the creation of the audio tours, she said, and not everything researchers learned about Montezuma County history could fit into three 30-minute podcasts.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s exciting because there are so many more stories to tell,\u201d she said. \u201cThere are so many layers of history in this area.\u201d<\/p>\n
Eventually she hopes to make more audio tours, but since it was a one-time grant that made these ones possible, it\u2019s not clear how future podcasts would be funded. In the meantime, Kirkpatrick said that once all three podcasts are available, she plans to break them up into smaller files so visitors can listen to information on Hovenweep or Canyons of the Ancients without downloading the whole tour.<\/p>\n
The \u201cAncient Voices\u201d tour and the other two podcasts are available for free.<\/p>\n
\n
Find out more<\/h4>\n
To download the new audio tours or learn more about Mesa Verde Country, go to
\n www.mesaverdecountry.com
\n .<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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