Mesa Verde National Park - Colorado

After having spent a wonderful week in Moab, Utah visiting Arches NP, Canyonlands NP and Dead Horse State Park, we reluctantly said farewell and headed south to Mesa Verde NP in Colorado. It took less than two hours to go from Moab UT to Cortez, CO which is just west of Mesa Verde. This gave us the opportunity to visit the park on Monday afternoon after dropping our Big Sky at a nearby private campground. We hadn’t realized just how long of a drive it was from the entrance of the park to where the cliff dwellings were located, a drive accentuated by several stretches where the road was perched on the edge of precipitous drop-offs, with no guard rail between us and the abyss!!!!!!!!! Needless to say, Jo was having no part of actually driving along these stretches of the road!!
We were fortunate enough to be able to buy tickets at the Visitors Center for a late afternoon tour of the Cliff Palace, the largest individual collection of dwellings in the park. Cliff Palace is situated in a very wide alcove tucked under an overhang in a canyon wall. We had to climb down more than 100 feet, using ladders for part of this journey in order to reach the alcove where the Cliff Palace dwellings are located. At least we were spared having to use the hand and toe holds which the original Native Americans had used on a daily basis to climb up and down between their dwellings in the alcove and the mesa above where they had their fields of corn.
We were surprised to learn that the archeologists do not really know why Meza Verde Indians chose to build their dwellings in these difficult-to-access alcoves. They had been building pueblo housing on the mesa above for several hundred years before suddenly deciding around 1200 A.D. to move into whatever alcoves they could find in various sections of the canyon walls in this area. The early theories had been that they moved off of the flat mesas and down into these alcoves to secure dwelling locations that would be easier to defend from hostile tribes. This theory is now coming into doubt, however, because of the absence of any evidence of warfare taking place in this area at the time when the Indians moved their dwellings.

Whatever the reason for the move, it was intriguing to see how they succeeded in building tiny little dwelling sin the limited space available in these alcoves. A typical “room” for a family in the Cliff Palace area was only about 6’ by 8’ or smaller. Most of these rooms had no space for a fireplace inside, so they were quite cold in the winter time and apparently common practice when winter came was for families to move into the underground Kivas’, the small, circular rooms typically carved down into the ground and covered with a roof that acted as the only real courtyard areas in places like Cliff Palace.

The next day we returned to Mesa Verde to explore more of the cliff dwellings as well as the remains of the pueblo dwellings up on the mesa which had been the earlier homes of the Anasazi. We were glad that we had the opportunity to visit the Cliff Place on the day before because we ended up spending the entire day visiting other parts of Mesa Verde. We started the day visiting the Spruce Tree House Ruins which is smaller than Cliff Palace but in a better state of preservation. We also had a ranger there who was extremely friendly as well as knowledgeable. While he helped flesh out what life must have been like for the Anasazi, he was not able to answer the question bugging David about why they had moved down into these tiny holes in the cliff wall, nor could he answer for certain why all of the Anasazi apparently disappeared from this area around AD 1300.

Much of the rest of the day was spent visiting the remains of the pit houses and other earlier dwellings up on the mesa. It was much easier to invision what life in the mesa dwellings would have been like as compared to having to climb up and down the sheer canyon walls each day going to and from the tiny rooms in the cliff dwellings. At the end of the day, we regretted that we only had a day and one half to visit these wonderful ruins as they were so lovely that we could have spent more time here with no problem.