Mesa Verde National Park

Sunday, October 29, 2023

Pretty much stayed inside today we have a slight breeze, 25mph, blowing through.

A couple of halfway decent shots

of last nights full moon.
Hunter's Moon.

Thursday, October 12. 2023 (More Catching Up)

Heading east on US-160

towards the Mesa Verde National Park.

Mesa Verde National Park is an American national park and UNESCO World Heritage Site located in Montezuma County, Colorado. The park protects some of the best-preserved Ancestral Puebloan archaeological sites in the United States.

Established by Congress and President Theodore Roosevelt in 1906, the park occupies 52,485 acres (21,240 ha) near the Four Corners region of the American Southwest. With more than 5,000 sites, including 600 cliff dwellings,it is the largest archaeological preserve in the United States.The park was an effort to "preserve the works of man" and was the first park created to protect a location of cultural significance. Mesa Verde (Spanish for "green table", or more specifically "green table mountain") is best known for structures such as Cliff Palace, thought to be the largest cliff dwelling in North America.

Starting c. 7500 BC Mesa Verde was seasonally inhabited by a group of nomadic Paleo-Indians known as the Foothills Mountain Complex. The variety of projectile points found in the region indicates they were influenced by surrounding areas, including the Great Basin, the San Juan Basin, and the Rio Grande Valley. Later, Archaic people established semi-permanent rock shelters in and around the mesa. By 1000 BC, the Basketmaker culture emerged from the local Archaic population, and by 750 AD the Ancestral Puebloans had developed from the Basketmaker culture.

The Pueblonians survived using a combination of hunting, gathering, and subsistence farming of crops such as corn, beans, and squash (the "Three Sisters"). They built the mesa's first pueblos sometime after 650, and by the end of the 12th century, they began to construct the massive cliff dwellings for which the park is best known. By 1285, following a period of social and environmental instability driven by a series of severe and prolonged droughts, they abandoned the area and moved south to locations in Arizona and New Mexico, including the Rio Chama, the Albuquerque Basin, the Pajarito Plateau, and the foot of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

Our first stop was at the Mesa Verde Visitor and Research Center. Just outside the Mesa Verde Visitor and Research Center, you will find a beautiful sculpture called ‘The Ancient Ones’.
The cliff climber monument is created by American artist Edward J. Fraughton and was installed in 2013, when the visitor center was completed and opened to public.
It is twenty feet high and is an amazing work of art.
The sculpture depicts an ancestral Pueblo Indian climbing the steep sandstone cliff with a basketful of firewood.

The Ancient Ones

Inside we expected to pick up the normal National Park Brochure about the park. They were out and the suggestion was to take a picture of the map and download the app. In the next sentence we were told the internet connection inside the visitor center was not good and our best chance of doing so was outside. We were given a paper copy of this map when we went through the actual entrance to the park. The park ranger behind the desk told us basically there is only one road in and out of the park and stops are clearly marked. He was right on both these counts. It still would have been nice to have a brochure. Since, I am sure they have a pretty good idea of how many visitors they have on any given day this, in our opinion, should not have been an issue. I took the picture of the map and never did find a signal to download the App. Of course, truthfully I did not make it a priority. We decided to just enjoy the ride and see what we could see. This park really cannot be fully experienced in one day but that was what we had so we made the best of it.

We are now on the road into the park.

I am pretty sure I have the pictures in the right order but honestly not 100% sure. Though, I did take all these pictures inside the park...LOL

Point Lookout Mountain

We decided to take the 20 mile drive through to
the Chapin Mesa Archeological Museum. 

The views were beautiful even through the dirty windshield.

This collage may or may not be in the exact right place.

The Chapin Mesa Archeological Museum displays dioramas illustrating Ancestral Puebloan life. There are also many exhibits of prehistoric artifacts, a chronology of Ancestral Puebloan culture, and other items related to the park.

I did not take any pictures of the displays but one display I found extremely interesting was of artifacts and things some people collected within the park, felt bad about doing so, and sent them back to the museum.

The Chapin Mesa Museum

Two of the paintings on the walls were we watched a movie
about the National Park and the ruins.
This one is called Pottery Making.

Making Piki

Behind the museum is the Spruce Tree House which we could have walked down to but we did not it was hot and I had left my walking stick and cane back at the motorhome. I would have needed one of these with my knees to do so. Since, having them replaced I am careful about walking on steep and uneven ground as falling on them is not anything I want to experience.

Spruce Tree House, the third largest cliff dwelling (Cliff Palace and Long House are larger), was constructed between about 1211 and 1278 CE by the ancestors of the Pueblo peoples of the Southwest. The dwelling contains about 130 rooms and 8 kivas (kee-vahs), or ceremonial chambers, built into a natural alcove measuring 216 feet (66 meters) at greatest width and 89 feet (27 meters) at its greatest depth. It is thought to have been home for about 60 to 80 people.

The cliff dwelling was first discovered in 1888, when two local ranchers chanced upon it while searching for stray cattle. A large tree, which they identified as a Douglas Spruce (later called Douglas Fir), was found growing from the front of the dwelling to the mesa top. It is said that the men first entered the dwelling by climbing down this tree, which was later cut down by another early explorer.

Today, it is known as one of the best preserved cliff dwellings in the park. Due to the protection of the alcove, 90% of the material you see such as walls, wood, and plaster are original.

Spruce Tree House

Landscape of Home

What makes a place a home? Abundant resources? Closeness to family? Generations of memories? Here you see one of the oldest permanent structures built on the mesa, where early Ancestral Pueblo settlers enjoyed many of the same comforts we enjoy in our homes today.

Though nomadic people lived in the surrounding area for thousands of years, permanent farmsteads began to appear on the mesa around 550. Planting corn, beans, and squash, along with continuing to hunt and gather wild foods, gave them a more reliable and balanced food supply. The transition to farming allowed the Pueblo people to set

down roots. This new lifestyle spurred traditions and innovations that would last for centuries. Resourceful and attuned to their environment, the Ancestral Pueblo people took advantage of the earth’s natural insulation by building pithouses—semi-subterranean homes. The atlatl and spear were replaced with a lighter and more accurate hunting tool: the bow and arrow. Light and portable basketry made way for durable pottery, better for storing and cooking food.

The pictures below are of two covered areas that protect these foundations. Clicking on the pictures will open them larger in a new window and the print on the signs should be readable, if you are interested. This was definitely an interesting stop.

Circular underground room, part of the second village, represents another important change occurring in the Ancestral Pueblo life, this transition of pithouses as family homes to structures called kivas. Small household kivas like this one, may have been used for a mix of routine and special purposes. In pueblo villages today, kivas have special uses and meanings.

Kivas

Ancestral Pueblo homes needed places for many purposes such as eating, sleeping, storage, and food processing. Did each room or space have a particular function, or did they satisfy a variety of needs at different times and seasons? When the weather was mild, outdoor plazas were probably busy work areas. During the cold winter season, subterranean rooms would be comfortable locations for working, sleeping, and sharing oral histories.

Overlapping Pithouses

To maintain their homes people repaired the mud covering after the summer rainy season, (or perhaps after every heavy rainstorm), and then every spring after the snow melted. Wooden support timbers were replaced when the bases rotted. Today, experimentation suggests that pithouses were completely rebuilt every 10 to 20 years.

Pueblonians used astronomical observations to plan their farming and religious ceremonies, drawing on both natural features in the landscape and masonry structures built for this purpose. Several great houses in the region were aligned to the cardinal directions, which positioned windows, doors, and walls along the path of the sun, whose rays would indicate the passing of seasons. Mesa Verde's Sun Temple is thought to have been an astronomical observatory.

The temple is D-shaped, and its alignment is 10.7 degrees off true east–west. Its location and orientation indicate that its builders understood the cycles of both the sun and the moon. It is aligned to the major lunar standstill, which occurs once every 18.6 years, and the sunset during the winter solstice, which can be viewed setting over the temple from a platform at the south end of Cliff Palace, across Fewkes Canyon. At the bottom of the canyon is the Sun Temple fire pit, which is illuminated by the first rays of the rising sun during the winter solstice. Sun Temple is one of the largest exclusively ceremonial structures ever built by the Ancestral Puebloans.

When you are standing at this sign looking at the Sun Temple

There is an indent in the wall where you can look in an
opening and this is what you see looking each way.
There is no other way to see inside this structure.

Walking the path back to the car we could see the 
Cliff Palace in the distance.

I was thrilled with how well my camera did
taking pictures of the Cliff Palace.
 

Cliff Palace is the largest cliff dwelling in North America. The structure built by the Ancestral Puebloans is located in Mesa Verde National Park in their former homeland region. The cliff dwelling and park are in Montezuma County, in the southwestern corner of Colorado, in the Southwestern United States.

Recent studies reveal that Cliff Palace contained 150 rooms and 23 kivas and had a population of approximately 100 people. Out of the nearly 600 cliff dwellings concentrated within the boundaries of the park, 75% contain only 1-5 rooms each, and many are single room storage units. If you visit Cliff Palace you will enter an exceptionally large dwelling which may have had special significance to the original occupants. It is thought that Cliff Palace was a social, administrative site with high ceremonial usage.

Sandstone, mortar and wooden beams were the three primary construction materials for the cliff dwellings. The Ancestral Pueblo people shaped each sandstone block using harder stones collected from nearby river beds. The mortar between the blocks is a mixture of local soil, water and ash. Fitted in the mortar are tiny pieces of stone called "chinking." Chinking stones filled the gaps within the mortar and added structural stability to the walls. Over the surface of many walls, the people decorated with earthen plasters of pink, brown, red, yellow, or white -- the first things to erode with time.

Local Indigenous groups were well aware of the Cliff Palace before local rancher Al Wetherill and several others claimed to have seen it in the 1880s. On December 18, 1888, Al’s brother Richard and their brother-in-law, Charles Mason, found the site. The men were searching for cattle with their Ute guide, Acowitz, when they first saw the structure. They explored it and soon discovered other cliff dwellings and pueblos nearby.

Cliff Palace had deteriorated somewhat in the six centuries since its occupation, but the process of decay accelerated rapidly after its rediscovery, as it saw increased visitation from pothunters, amateur archaeologists, and tourists. In response, a movement developed in the 1890s and early 1900s to make Mesa Verde a national park and to pass the Antiquities Act (1906) to prevent looting and vandalism at prehistoric sites on public land.

Just before I took this I could see a tour leaving and after a
few minutes they disappeared behind the trees.

Even though we physically moved away, the spirits of my ancestors are still here.

 If you stop for a minute and listen, you can hear the children laughing and the women talking. You can hear the dogs barking and the turkeys gobbling. You can hear and feel the beat of the drums and the singing. You can smell the cooking fires. You can feel their presence, their warmth, their sense of community” 

                                                                                    - TJ Atsye, Laguna Pueblo

Today, Cliff Palace stands as a testament to the engineering and artistic achievements of the Ancestral Pueblo people. (Why I was not going to take the tour: On the tour, you will descend uneven stone steps and climb four ladders, with an elevation change of 100 feet (30 m). Total walking distance is 1/4 mile (0.4 km). When we checked into tickets we would have had to stay several more days for Tom to take the tour and he decided he did not want to stay to take it this time.

Leaving the view point for the Cliff Palace we headed back out of the National Park. Some of the pictures may be of the same view as coming in but the different angle gives a whole different perspective of the beauty opening up before you as you come down the hill.

Far View Terrace
We stopped for lunch here earlier in the day and
I remembered to take a picture on the way down.

Views seem to go on for ever.

Back through the tummel

and so ended our day at Mesa Verde National Park.

One last picture of Point Lookout Mountain and
we are headed home.

It was a long day but well worth our time. It is a beautiful National Park and there is so much more to explore. If we are back this way again we will certainly spend more time there. If in your travels you come by here we would recommend you take the time to ride through and see what you can. 

We are so glad you stopped by!

If you have time to leave a comment we would enjoy hearing from you.