Mesa Verde National Park

I had to leave my car in Cortez, Colorado for some repairs.  After I picked it up on Thursday morning, I took advantage of my proximity to Mesa Verde National Park and decided to head in for a quick tour.... which lasted almost six hours.

There are fires in Mesa Verde almost every year.  The fires are almost always caused my lightning strikes.  The most recent serious fires were in 1996, 2000, and 2002.  There are many bare vistas as a result.

Mesa Verde houses some of the most well preserved and largest cliff dwellings.  This one, the Cliff Palace, can only be visited with a ranger.  It was occupied by the Ancestral Puebloans between 1100 and 1300 AD.  These are the people formerly referred to as the Anasazi (a Navajo word meaning "the ancient ones").

They estimate that about 100-150 people lived in this area.  This site was discovered by cattle ranchers in the mid 1800s.  Only about 30% of the structures needed to be repaired by the National Park Service.  The Ancestral Puebloans left the area, likely due to an extended drought, around 1298 AD.

The tour group ahead of us gives a sense of scale.  They are standing around kivas which are constructed pits and are the ceremonial centers of the dwellings and the culture.  Each kiva has a firepit, nooks for seating, and a hole in the ground called a sipapu-- these are the holes from which the Ancestral Puebloans believe they ascended onto this earth. 

The wooden support beams are original.  Archeologists sampled the wood to determine what the climate was like in this period of time.

Almost all of the fallen trees in the park have been sampled at the base for this kind of study, called dendrochronology.

The near wall was reconstructed by the NPS in the 1930s and 1940s partly by folks working for the WPA.  The wall in the distance is the original construction.  The Ancestral Puebloans were obviously better masons than we are.

One of the kivas at the Cliff Palace.  The fire pit is protected from the ventilation outlet by a thin rock.  Pretty ingenius design!

Leaving the canyon via 70 stone steps and 3 10-ft ladders.  Quite a few members of the group were huffing and puffing and blaming it on the altitude.  We were at about 7200 feet above sea level.

Part of the 2000 burn.  They no longer try to contain the forest fires in this park.

A kiva pot in the park museum.  The traditional pottery from this area is black and white.

After the guided tour of the Cliff Palace, I took a hike to see some petroglyphs.

Blooming bitterbrush.

Western Clematis.

View down the canyon.

Petroglyphs.  These were interpreted in the 1980s by some Hopi men who said this was a creation myth.