Living on the Edge

[resqgeek]

Yesterday morning, we headed up the steep and winding access road into Mesa Verde National Park. Our first stop was the visitor's center, to buy tickets for a guided tour of one of the cliff side pueblos. After consulting with a Park Ranger, my MIL decided that she wasn't physically up to the rigors of the hike involved, so we bought four tickets, and set off to the cliffs. We stopped at the Spruce Tree House pueblo, which is a self-guided tour, with fully paved walkways. It still involves a long climb in and out of the canyon, but my MIL survived the trip. She then headed in to explore the museum while the rest of us headed for the Cliff Palace pueblo for our guided tour.

The Cliff Palace is the largest of the cliff dwelling structures in the park, with more than 100 rooms. Archaeologists used to think that several hundred people lived here, but now they believe that only about 23 of the rooms were living quarters. The now believe that the Cliff Palace was a ceremonial/social gathering place where people from the numerous surrounding pueblos came together.

Our tour took us down a steep, narrow set of steps carved into the sandstone walls of the canyon. The park ranger leading our tour was told us about the changing theories about the ancestral puebloan people who lived on Mesa Verde, and noted that there is much we don't yet understand about how they lived, and why they left.

The tour took us down into the pueblo itself, allowing us to walk right up to (but not into) the buildings. After telling us about the ruins and the people that built them, we were given time to explore before making our way back to the top of the canyon wall, where our cars were parked. The trail up was even steeper than the path in, and included several short ladders. Along the way, we glimpsed some of the finger and toe holes the ancestral puebloans had carved into the sandstone to climb the canyon walls. These were ample motivation for anyone with doubts about climbing the wooden ladders provided for modern visitors.

After collecting my MIL, we did a quick tour around the mesa top, before descending back towards the valley below. After a desperately needed stop for fuel (I was very glad the trip out of the park was mostly down hill!), we headed off to the northwest, across the state line into Utah.