Mesa Verde means green table in Spanish. This National Park that was established in 1906 was our destination today. We got an early start this morning and drove the ten miles from the campground to the visitors center. We bought tickets there for the Cliff Palace Tour. They told us it would take an hour to get to the overlook of Cliff Palace where we would start our tour. The road is over twenty miles and climbs from a little under seven thousand feet in elevation to over eight thousand and back down to seven thousand feet through a series of switchbacks, passes and long stretches along the mesas. Along the way we had great views out over the flat plains of southern Colorado. We even passed through a mountain in a tunnel. In the distance we could see the Abajo, San Juan, Sleeping Ute and La Sal Mountain Ranges, all of which were formed by magma pushing up through the earth's crust and appear to rise straight up out of the plains. The mesas, though not as high, appear to do the same.
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| Visitors Center |
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| Winding Road Up |
Since we had a 10:30 tour time and it was about 9:00, we didn't stop at any overlooks on the way in. The area where we waited for the tour looked down into the Cliff Palace, a scene we had seen in so many photographs over the years. The trails down and back up were built by the CCC back in the 1930s. There are one hundred steps down, the first section were steel with a railing. After that, the steps were cut from rocks in a narrow slot between the cliff and a huge boulder. A short walk along the face to the cliff and up a ladder brought us to our first stop on the tour. The guide (from Massachusetts) was very informative and once the tour ahead of us moved on, we were able to stand under the overhang next to the amazingly well built and architecturally interesting structures. Some of the stone work was exquisitely done, some was much rougher craftsmanship showing that different people created different sections.
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| Started from Up There |
The village was built from 1100 to 1278 a.d. It had a hundred fifty rooms and housed about a hundred people. The life expectancy back then was only thirty years. When we moved along the ledge again we were able to look down into a kiva or ceremonial pit as well as look through the door of a four story building whose floors, ceilings and roof no longer existed. The door wasn't even three feet high. The people who lived here were farmers and their crops were on top of the mesa. They climbed up and down the face of the cliff by hand and toe holds pounded into the cliff. On our way back up the narrow trail, we could see some of these indentations in the rock. In order to put the time period into perspective, the guide told us that when people inhabited this area the Notre Dame in Paris was just beginning to be built, Marco Polo was just getting ready to set out on his journey and it would be another three hundred years before Columbus came to America. Of the four thousand ruins within the park, only six hundred are cliff dwellings and all of those were built between 1100 and 1300.
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| Masonry Has Stood Up |
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| Doors Were Small Poles Were Structure for Floors |
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| Fire Pit Shield from Vent Air |
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| Going Up Different Stairs Also Built by CCC |
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| Cliff Palace Seen from Across The Valley |
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| Depiction of Life in Cliff Palace |
When we finished at Cliff Palace we continued the loop stopping at a couple of overlooks and then drove on to the Mesa Top Loop. This loop has ten stops showing various stages of buildings from pit houses to pueblos and from single dwellings to villages. The remains, many of which are preserved under the covers of roofs range in age from the sixth through the thirteenth centuries. The pit houses were the most primitive and with ceilings only about five or six feet off the ground, most burned. At one of the stops we looked out the open side of the building and saw two does and a buck mule deer. Many of the sites had numerous stages built on top of each other.
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| Normally, Very Few Windows |
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| House of Many Windows |
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| Making Hand/Foot Holds to Climb Up to Farm |
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| Primitive Pit House c.a. 600 |
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| Four Story Tower House Plus Masonry Lower Right - Tallest Building in Park |
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| Most of the 4000 Dwelling Remains Were Up on the Mesa |
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| Protective Structures to Preserve Kiva |
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| Dwellings Evolved to Stone Walls |
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| Cliff Dwellings Are the Best Preserved |
Once we finished the Mesa Top Loop, we went to the Chapin Mesa Archeological Museum. We watched the twenty-five minute film, at least I did. I think Ted slept through part of it. Then we wandered through the amazing museum of artifacts found at sites around the area. The ancestral Puebloans made beautiful baskets and pottery as well as tools, jewelry and many other things. It was quite impressive. By the time we finished there, we were quite exhausted so we started the long trek back to Cortez.
When we got back to the campsite, our neighbor, Frank, from Connecticut was sitting outside so we started chatting with him. I went inside and took the guys out a beer and then Linda came out with a glass of wine and I got one as well. We sat and chatted for an hour or so before going in for dinner. After dinner, the people on the other side of us were having trouble getting their slide in so Ted went out to see if he could help. Katie came out and we chatted getting to know each other. When she had to go back inside to try the slide she invited me in to their Phaeton, my dream coach before we bought our Suncruiser. She is a quilter and showed me one of her quilts. Very nice. The guys worked until after dark and finally found out what was the matter. They needed a part so had to wait until morning. We visited in their coach for awhile and then took them over to see ours. I was ready for bed by the time they left.
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