Colorado 2014: Day Five

We spent our fifth day of vacation, from 8:30 a.m. until 5 p.m., exploring Mesa Verde National Park. Mesa Verde is in southwest Colorado and is known for its many cliff dwellings. The Ancestral Puebloans lived and farmed on the mesa top starting around 600 AD, but they moved to the cliff dwellings in 1190. By 1300, the Ancestral Puebloans had left Mesa Verde, possibly due to drought. The cliff dwellings were discovered in 1888 when two ranchers were searching the canyons for stray cattle.

Our first stop was the Visitors Center, where we took this photo, bought tour tickets, signed the boys up for the Junior Rangers program, and learned more about the people of Mesa Verde.

You can visit much of the park on your own, but there are three cliff dwellings that require tickets for ranger-guided tours. Will read up on everything in the visitors' guide the night before, and he chose the hour-long guided tour of Cliff Palace for us. 

Cliff Palace is one of the largest cliff dwellings in the park. It has 150 rooms and 23 kivas and was home to over 100 people. Some of the walls and buildings have undergone restoration work, but much of the site is original. It is an amazing place to visit!

The tours at Mesa Verde are not for the faint-of-heart. Our tour took us up four ladders, but other tours require crawling through tunnels and climbing a 60-foot ladder. Ours was definitely do-able.

The Ancestral Puebloans used sandstone, mortar and wood to build their buildings. The climate is so dry that the wood is preserved, and archaeologists used tree-ring dating, or dendrochronology, to date the buildings at Mesa Verde. The Ancestral Puebloans also took advantage of natural boulders as foundations; the one below has two large cracks that have been stabilized from below.

This T-shaped window is typical of the cliff dwellings.

While we took stairs and ladders and paths to reach Cliff Palace, the Ancestral Puebloans would have climbed up the cliff face, using hand- and foot-holds in the rock.

After our tour, we happened upon a Ute Indian couple selling fry bread. It was the perfect snack for our starving boys! 

Will had also picked out a hike for us to do in the morning. We walked the Soda Canyon Overlook Trail, a 1.2 mile round-trip trail with amazing views of Balcony House and the canyon. 

As you can see, the terrain is very different from Pagosa Springs. It was drier and much more desert-like.

And it was hotter too! Our car said it was 88 degrees, so we made sure to drink lots and lots of water.

After a much-needed lunch break, we walked down to visit Spruce Tree House, another cliff dwelling.

We actually got to go down inside a kiva with a reconstructed roof to see what it was like.

We saw lots and lots of lizards everywhere.

After visiting the museum and completing their workbooks, the boys were sworn in as Junior Rangers.

We ended the day with the Mesa Top Loop Drive. We got out to see a couple of pithouses

and then called it a day! 

We had a very full day and learned and saw a lot of new things, but we were more than happy to return to our rental house, crank up the A/C, and relax for the rest of the evening.