Mesa Verde National Park

10/13 Today we went to look at cliff dwellings. After looking at quite a few I can't imagine what drove these people to build their homes in such hard to reach places and then continue to live in them for 150 years. I guess good sense won out and they finally moved south to join with other tribes. That is the real mystery though, why build these elaborate buildings and then just disappear one day? More accessible housing? Non compliance with the ADA?
In Mesa Verde there are 600 cliff dwellings and more than 4,300 building sites including temples, pit houses and regular stone houses. The Four Corners region in littered with thousands of cliff dwellings and building sites. Most of them are in national parks like Mesa Verde or Canyon of the Ancients and others are in national monuments such as Navajo, Chimney Rock, Aztec, and others and some sites are on tribal lands that are not for viewing. I am glad that we get to see these places, marvel at their engineering, the tenacity of the builders and the mystery that surrounds them.

 The first stop inside the park is the Visitor's Center which has a few exhibits on the Ancestral Puebloan cliff dwellings and a large library and catalog of artifacts. The artifacts were all under lock and key in an environmental controlled room.

The climb up from the VC to Far View is about two thousand feet through switchbacks and hairpins. Once again the CCC was here during the depression employing the nation's youth to build roads, construct trails and buildings that blend into the surrounding environment and look like the houses built by the Indians who lived here.
I hooked a right onto Wetherill Mesa Road which is a twelve mile winding can of worms and malaria germs. At the end of it is Long House Loop, a paved trail for walking and riding bikes. You can see several cliff dwellings. We did not take it the trail. Instead we backtracked to Far View and went out to Mesa Top Loop and Cliff Palace Loop.

 The city of Cortez stretched out below.

Looking back on Wetherill Road

 The next stop on the journey is Spruce Tree House, which Patrick said didn't look anything like a tree house so why name it that? Also there are no Spruce Trees in the area but someone called it that and the name stuck.

 The ranger at the VC said that this was an easy trail and I could make it up and down without much problem. I looked at it and said I thought it would be tough and Becky told me I was going down and liking it. Uh, okay. We got the dog leash out of the car along with my gloves and we started down. It was steep! Becky wrapped the leash around the back of the chair and acted as an anchor for me. (I don't recommend anyone in a wheelchair take this trail).

 At the bottom we were up close and personal with the cliff dwellings. Looking down into a kiva. This structure was actually covered and had a ladder in the center going down. The kiva was used as a gathering place and for religious ceremonies. In the bottom of the kiva are two holes, a large one for a firepit and a smaller one called a sipapu. These people believed that the original inhabitants of the earth lived underground until the first man and woman broke out through a hole in the ground. The kiva is a representation of living underground and the sipapu represents the hole that the first man and woman climbed out of.

We had to go back up the same trail, this time Becky pushing and Patrick using the lease to pull. A man grabbed hold of the lease and helped Becky pull and part way up they stopped to rest. At 7000 feet the oxygen is thin and B and P were panting hard. A second man came up and offered to push. Becky and the first guy took off pulling and jerked the chair out from underneath me and I ended up on my back in the arms of the guy behind me. After getting back in the chair, they shoved me all the way up the hill without further incident.
At the top is a small museum and VC so we took a look. There are steps in the museum so I couldn't see all of it. These dioramas were built by the young men of the CCC and they look great today. 

Next up we took Mesa Loop Road.

After the pit houses there is Cliff Canyon where there are multiple cliff dwellings making this a subdivision.

This is the canyon where all those dwellings were at. The supermarket is on top and bottom.

 Cliff Palace is the "crown jewel" of the park. It is the largest cliff dwelling in North America. It had 150 rooms, 75 open spaces and 21 kivas. All the water and building materials had to be hauled in from elsewhere over steep ladders and carved handholds. Only 25 rooms were actually residential and which leads scientist to believe that only 100-120 people lived here. This was one of the last cliff dwellings to be built and took the better part of 20 years between 1260 and 1280 AD (they used tree ring data from core samples of the wood used in the dwellings). There is a ranger lead tour of this palace and it rather strenuous climbing ladders and crawling through tunnels.

 As we were leaving looking back down the mountain at the site of the cliff dwellings.