Mesa Verde: Green Tables and Cliff Dwellings

Desperate People Do Desperate Things

National Parks preserving cliff dwellings are pretty common in the American South West, my personal favorite being Walnut Canyon National Monument.  Probably the most famous of these parks in Mesa Verde National Park in south western Colorado.  

The buildings and an ancient kiva at Spruce Tree House.

Mesa Verde (green table in Spanish) refers to the plateau into the steep sides of which cliff dwellings are carved.  To access the dwellings visitors drive up a winding two lane road from the main visitor's center ascending the plateau.  From the plateau summit, visitors can hike down trails to explore the cliff dwellings below.  We visited Mesa Verde in November which like many of the other national parks in the area offered advantages and disadvantages.  The main advantage was the lack of people.  Parking lots built to hold hundreds of cars at a time, allowing thousands of visitors to crowd overlooks and into ruins were completely empty.  We parked wherever we wanted and enjoyed the scenery all by ourselves.

Ready to explore some cliff dwellings in Mesa Verde National Park.

The main drawback to visiting this time of year is that tours of most accessible cliff dwellings are not offered, making those dwellings completely off limits to visitors.  The only dwelling we were allowed to walk down to on the trip was Spruce Tree House.  We joined a ranger led tour which gave an overview of the history of Mesa Verde on the trail down to the dwelling.  Once at the dwelling we were allowed to wander around the structure taking photos and climbing down in a reconstructed kiva.  A kiva was a cylindrical hole in the ground with a roof.  The Ancestral Pueblo people descended into the kiva for ceremonial events, as they believed creation came from the ground.

Up close on our tour of the Spruce Tree House.

Mesa Verde was inhabited by the Ancestral Pueblo People, so called because they built mud brick pueblos as their primary habitations.  Remnants of the habitations still exist atop Mesa Verde, and other similar pueblos built by other groups of the Ancestral Pueblo People can be seen in Wupatki and Walnut Canyon National Monuments.  The reasons the Ancestral Pueblo People resorted to carving houses and storage rooms (mostly storage rooms) in the sides of cliffs was war brought on by a scarcity of resources.  When the cliff dwellings were in use the only access to them was by climbing down from the plateau above via a ladder cut into the rock cliff itself.  These cliff dwellings were refuges for people just trying to get by.

Climbing out of a reconstructed kiva at Spruce Tree House.

Looking at the cliff dwellings today a person might think each dwelling was a great city harboring hundreds of people.  In reality each cliff house was maintained by one to a few families.  Most of the rooms the houses were used to store water, just like the cliff dwellings in Walnut Canyon.

Spruce Tree House, one of the many cliff dwellings in Mesa Verde.

Another unexpected fact about the dwellings of Mesa Verde is that despite all the effort constructing them, the dwellings were only inhabited for about one hundred years (ironically about how long it took to build one) until they were mysteriously abandoned all around the same time.  It seems the Ancienct Pueblo People just kept building until they gave up, or some omen told them to get the heck out.  It is unclear why the dwellings were abandoned.  The Ancient Pueblo People had no written language and evolved into the Native American Tribes that filled the south west US before the federal government eradicated them.  The more modern tribes know not why their ancestors gave up on the cliff dwellings because no verbal account has survived either.  For whatever reason the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde were abandoned almost a thousand years ago, I am happy so many survived to this day (six hundred within the park alone).

We saw two wild horses within the park on the drive to the cliff dwellings.

In addition to climbing down to Spruce Tree House and viewing the other cliff dwellings from overlooks, we got two nice surprises on the drive back out the park.  Two wild horses, both alone, were grazing by the roadside one ironically hanging out by the sign warning visitors not to approach wild horses within the park.  Maybe that horse has learned he gets harassed less by hanging around a sign telling visitors to stay away.  I've never seen wild horses roaming free before, and I thought it a great way to end our day at Mesa Verde National Park.