Mesa Verde National Park
Cortez, Colorado
Sunday/Monday, June 3-4, 2018
Clear, 85°
“Blessed are the curious for they shall have adventures.”
Anytime I am in the Southwestern part of the country I try to visit one of my favorite places, Mesa Verde, Colorado. I am always left in awe of the history of this area and its people, the Anasazi, now named the “Ancestral Pueblo Indians”.
Mesa Verde National Park is a National Park and World Heritage Site located in Southwest, Colorado near the town of Cortez. It protects some of the best preserved Ancestral Puebloan archaeological sites in the United States.
Created by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1906, the park occupies 52,485 acres near the Four Corners region of the American Southwest. With more than 4,500 known archaeological sites, including 600 cliff dwellings, it is the largest archaeological preserve in the United States. Mesa Verde (Spanish for "green table") is best known for structures such as Cliff Palace, thought to be the largest cliff dwelling in North America.
Cliff Palace
The park is large, extending over twenty miles from the entrance to several of the cliff dwelling sites. The museum is also close-by with many artifacts and other display cases with items found on different sites during the restoration or archaeological digs. It is amazing to see how these people lived, worked, and prospered in such a unique way with the land, the cliffs, and the mesa tops. Putting time and effort into building a viable civilization, then to vanish off the face of the earth with no clues as to where they went and why, is mind boggling. This happened around 1200 AD. Scientists think it may have been due to a long drought but they really don’t know since there is no other evidence anywhere as to where they may have relocated. They simply vanished.
The National Park Service has done a great job preserving and maintaining these cliff dwellings, artifacts, and the history of these people. Since my last visit, metal buildings have been built to cover some of the mesa top kivas and housing areas so rain and possible flash floods cannot destroy them. I was not sure, at first, if I liked those changes but it keeps everything in a pristine centuries old condition.
Kiva pit
Mesa Verde is vast; the climb up to the mesa top is long and winding, giving you the opportunity to see great vistas, towering cliffs, and evidence of several fires from years past leaving its scars across the landscape.
Mesa Fire damage
Once on top of the mesa you can see for miles. The beauty and grandeur of the canyons, other mesas, and the vegetation overloads senses. Much of one horizon opens to another and the vastness never seems to end.
Mesa View
There are five main cliff dwellings in Mesa Verde. Cliff Palace, Balcony House, Long House, Square Tower House, and Spruce Tree House, several of which you can take tours down to walk around and see close-up how the Anasazi lived. Several were closed due to recent rocks falling and were under repairs.
There is also a five or six mile drive on top of the mesa with overlooks and parking areas to view the cliff dwellings, old kiva pits, and houses. The Sun Temple, which was a ceremonial and holy place for the tribe, is on top of the mesa. The villagers in this time period were farmers growing corn, squash, and beans on top of the mesa while hunters in the tribe looked for game.
Butterfly on Flower
In the museum, it was interesting to see the primitive tools that were made to do the work in the tribe. There were many tools made to make life easier. They made stone knives and bone hide scrapers. They used them and more for grinding, cutting, pounding, chopping, and scraping. The women made pottery and baskets, many of which had beautiful designs on them.
Square Tower House site was occupied from the mid-1100s to the late 1200s. The site contains about 49 rooms and 8 kivas. The eye catching structures are the 28 foot tall Square Tower and the Crow’s Nest high in a crevice. The view is from the top of the mesa. The NPS used to do tours but I think this one is closed to the public while repairs (or stabilization) to the site are being made.
Square Tower House
Deep in the heart of Mesa Verde is Cliff Palace, the largest cliff dwelling in North America. Considered the crown jewel of Mesa Verde National Park, an architectural masterpiece by any standard, from the rim top overlooks, the collection of rooms, plazas, and towers fit perfectly into the sweeping sandstone overhangs that have protected it since the thirteenth century.
Today there are ranger guided tours ($25/person) that start on top of the mesa then take down steps and ladders to the entrance of the dwelling. The ranger gives the history of Cliff Palace and answers questions as you walk past the many rooms, kivas, and other ruins within. You are guided from left to right and exit up a series of ladders back to the mesa top where the tour concludes. Cliff Palace has 150 rooms (living, storage, and special chambers) plus nearly 75 open spaces and 21 kivas.
The Spruce Tree House is the easiest of the large alcoves to visit and is really the center of Mesa Verde. In addition to being the third largest cliff dwelling with about 114 rooms and 8 kivas, the Chapin Mesa Museum is located at the trail head and there is a snack bar, book store and gift shop as part of the visitor facilities.
Spruce Tree House
The paved trail leading to Spruce Tree House is open as a self-guided route during the mild parts of the year and is the only guided and free tour available during the winter months. The plants along the trail are identified with comments on their possible use to the people who lived here. Two 2.4 mile hiking trails, the Petroglyph Trail and the Spruce Canyon Trail also begin at the same trail head. If you only have time for a short visit to Mesa Verde, the Spruce Tree House area is the place to go.
A sense of wonder catapults your mind into the possibilities of how these nomadic people moved from simple farming and foraging on the mesas to erecting these beautiful dwellings on the cliffs below. Looking down upon these sites from above or walking through them your mind and senses are on overload seeing the past, the pictographs on the walls or the remnants of pottery on the kiva floors. There are so many words to describe these places, beautiful, awe inspiring, epic, wonderful, amazing, but you are eventually left almost speechless in what you are seeing.
Ghost Cedar Tree
Mesa Verde is a wonderful place, Morefield campground sits on rolling hills close to the visitor’s center where mule deer wander grazing the countryside. Like Fallingwater, this is another bucket list place to see. You need to spend several days to really get a feel for the Anasazi and, probably like me, wonder why they vanished with no indication of where they might have relocated to. Alien abduction? Who knows but what they left behind is a pretty amazing place in America.