We’ve scheduled Mesa Verde a couple of times over the past few years, but had to postpone it due to winter-like weather. This year we decided to visit in September to avoid any snow. It was worth the wait as the place is amazing. We hoped to see a few great cliff dwellings, but this was way beyond our expectations. There are dozens of well preserved cliff dwelling complexes that reveal a large communities of tribes with a rich culture going back more than 1000 years.
Since about 550 AD, ancient tribes occupied the “mesa part” of Mesa Verde. This is the plateau above the cliffs where they built pit houses and planted crops. They occupied the mesa until about 1200 AD when they moved to the cliffs and built the cliff houses. The population of the area peaked at 40,000 in the mid-1200s. However, around 1300 they mysteriously packed up and migrated south to what is now northern Arizona and New Mexico. Their descendants still live there today. They left behind some 600 cliff dwellings that still exist in various states of repair.
The National Park was established in 1906 by Teddy Roosevelt. It has been extensively excavated and repaired since that time. It is one of the few places you can actually stand where the original builders walked, worked, and played. It’s amazing that they actually built these places on steep cliffsides and that men, women, and children moved freely despite narrow unprotected walkways. Further, they still climbed up to the mesa daily to tend their crops.
We took a Ranger led tour into Balcony House which was a modest size dwelling that contained the requisite water spring, food storage, cooking area, bedrooms, Kivas, and work areas. This gave us a feel for the daily climbing, squeezing through tunnels, and communal sleeping arrangements. We also took a drive through the Mesa where we saw several generations of pit houses, towers, and other constructions from the generations preceding the cliff dwellers.
