Mesa Verde National Park

Tuesday, April 24, 2011 Day 317 Well, today was our lucky day...actually tomorrow will be, too! As we drove up to Mesa Verde National Park, we discovered that this whole week, there is no charge to enter any national park. Yay! So, onward and upward.The road climbs from 6950 feet, twisting and turning up to 8572 feet, then back to about 7000 feet. Judy kept her eyes on the hillside, not the cliffs! There have been many fires over the years at this park, mostly caused by lightning. One sign we read said that over 70% of the park has been burned at one point or another. It was weird to see huge swathes of trees looking like this, and right next to them would be green trees obviously untouched by the same fire.

Our first stop, naturally was at the visitor center where we bought $3 tickets to a ranger led tour of one of cliff dwellings. This park was created in 1906 to preserve the archeological heritage of the Ancestral Puebloans, both on top of the mesas, and in the cliff dwellings below. The park includes over 4500 sites, 600 of them are cliff dwellings. This is a picture of one such dwelling, called Cliff Palace. The ranger told us the dwellings all date from around 1200, and were abandoned about 1275.

Cliff Palace is the largest cliff dwelling. The hike to get there isn't long, but it was a bit strenuous. All the signs ask you to be aware that people with health problems might not want to proceed. They don't tell you that people who are chicken shouldn't proceed either. (Ask Judy...) The trail is steep, and involves climbing up ladders at various points, with a 100 foot overall vertical ascent. But it was worth it to see all this close up and personally. The architectural details were astounding.

As you drive around the park, there are lookout points such as this one. Across the canyon you can just make out the "House of Windows". The openings aren't actually windows, they are doors. Small doors!

We stopped for another "short" hike to see another dwelling called Spruce Tree House. You could walk right up to this one, and Harris went down into a kiva to take this picture. Judy declined to go down another ladder.

Another picture of the Spruce Tree House cliff dwelling. The trail down is all paved...and easy....but going back up is another story! (and we were grateful for the path. We were told the Indians used hand and foot holds in the cliff itself to go up and down, not paths.)

We just did a little "taste" of Mesa Verde, because we knew we had miles to cover before dark. So we drove back down to the highway and across the little corner of Colorado into Utah. The mesa area itself was full of green and trees, and as we drove through the valley the landscape became flat and almost ugly, except where there were huge fields. Then, as we entered Utah, we encountered rock formations again.

Isn't this an interesting formation, standing there all by itself?

Tomorrow we're heading for Arches National Park. This is a little preview of what we hope to see.

Miles driven today= 150