Mesa Verde National Park

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What do you think of what you hear "National Park?" Wilderness? Wide open spaces? Lack of human impact? Those are the things I think of, and that's pretty much what we've experienced at the parks to date.

Mesa Verde National Park is different. It's the only national park devoted to a people and period in human history, the Ancestral Puebloans (previously, and incorrectly, called the Anasazi) in this case.


Don't get me wrong – there is plenty of wilderness and wipe open spaces at Mesa Verde – but those are not the main attraction.

From ~500 AD to ~1200 AD, there were human inhabitants in the Mesa Verde ("green table" in Spanish) area. They started with rudimentary pit houses, graduating to increasingly complex structures, and finally ending up in cliff dwellings before abandoning the area and moving south (no one knows why). It was quite impressive what they were able to pull off using mud and sandstone (they did not have metal tools).

Even thought the park covers the evolution from pit houses to cliff dwellings, it's the latter that most people want to see. And they are really something. Why they chose to move down into the cliffs from the surface, no one knows. They continued to farm up on the surface, even after moving their homes. That means they needed ways to scale the cliffs. In steeper areas they'd weave ropes and construct ladders. On sloped surfaces they'd carve hand/foot holds into the rock. Either way, it was a commitment to leave the house!



The cliff dwellings were in the rear of the park (fun fact: they weren't even within the original park boundaries; the National Park Service orchestrated a land swap with the Ute Indians to acquire them). This meant that there is a bit of a drive to get to them. We stopped at a number of overlooks along the way, each of which afforded magnificent views off of the mesa (another fun fact: despite the name, it isn't technically a mesa since only three sides have cliffs; a mesa has cliffs on all sides).

Colorado has offered us some of the better sunsets we've seen so far

Because the ruins are sensitive areas, a ranger is present during certain hours as a chaperone while you visit them (overlooks are open at all times). We visited the Step House ruins right before closing time, and when we returned to the surface, the ranger let the boys help lower and fold the flag.

Location: Mesa Verde National Park, Mesa Verde, CO, USA

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