Day 25: July 4 (posted July 6)
Much like Yellowstone’s hot springs, seeing every single Mesa Verde cliff dwelling and archaeological site in person is pretty cool— but as photographs, they look pretty repetitive. So just as with Yellowstone, I’ll try to pick out the highlights for today’s journal entry.
Mesa Verde became a national park in 1906. It was the 6th national park, and the first to center on a cultural rather than natural point of interest. Its founding was primarily the work of a woman named Virginia McClurg, a newspaper reporter from Colorado Springs in the late 19th century, who made it her life’s work to see the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde preserved. She enlisted the help of the Colorado General Federation of Women’s Clubs, who in turn formed the Colorado Cliff Dwellings Association. Formed entirely from women’s clubs, the association’s motto was Dux femina facti— Latin for “Women lead the way.”
Turning from the history of the park to the history of the site, Mesa Verde was home to a thriving population now known as the Ancestral Puebloans for around a thousand years. They weren’t an isolated community; the entire “Four Corners” region of present-day Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah was well-populated by Puebloan farms and villages, all in communication with each other. Changes in art and architecture happened at the same time all over the region, showing they remained one unified culture. There were networks of trade across the whole continent: archaeologists have found sea shells from California and feathers from South American birds among the artifacts at the sites.
As I set out to explore today, I learned that the closure of one of Mesa Verde’s two scenic roads, and almost all of its hiking trails, wasn’t just due to the current extreme fire risk: there have been fires breaking out every day. So far they’ve all been contained before spreading, but the rangers can’t have people out on the hiking trails where today’s new fire, springing up who knows where, might put them in danger. The closure of the visitor centers, museum, and cliff dwellings themselves, however, is due to the epidemic.
I’m going on too long before getting to the pictures. With so much closed, all I could do was tour the open scenic road and see what could be seen from the overlooks. Which was plenty: a number of sites on the mesa top are open and accessible by short trails, and there’s a downloadable app with an audio tour that I followed.
 |
My first stop was at the Far View sites. A loop trail here is one of the only two hiking trails currently open and takes you around a cluster of sites on the mesa top. Scattered small sites— most likely single-family homes— as well as larger pueblos covered the mesa top. This was a “Great House”— not a dwelling but a central meeting place. Their version of City Hall, perhaps. |
| “Pipe Shrine House,” near the Great House, so named because archaeologists found a number of clay tobacco pipes when they excavated it. |  |
 |
One of the bricks at Pipe Shrine House has this spiral carved on it; the reason is unknown, such markings aren’t found anywhere else here. |
| The Far View reservoir probably began as a natural depression where water collected, but over centuries was expanded with stone retaining walls with earth piled around outside, finally reaching 90 feet across. |  |
 |
To a layman’s eyes it doesn’t look all that difficult (and less so in the photograph) but apparently professional civil engineers can tell this reservoir was quite an achievement— and they gave it an award. |
The Ancestral Puebloans practiced “dry farming”— growing crops without irrigation, relying on the annual snowfall and brief summer rains to provide all the moisture needed, but they needed more water for drinking and to make the mortar used to build their structures.
 |
A kiva, with an unusual keyhole shape that appeared in Mesa Verde for a time (earlier and later kivas are plain circles). For modern Puebloans, kivas are ceremonial places. The function of the kiva in the ancestral culture may have changed over time. |
| Late in the period of Mesa Verde’s occupancy, the Puebloans began to build towers. 60 or so of them dot the mesa. At the time, there would have been no trees, they were removed to make farmlands, so the towers probably all had line of sight to each other. Were they watchtowers for defensive purposes? Communication towers? Something cermonial? Many, like this one, have kivas nearby and are connected to them by underground tunnels. Archaeologists can’t really say why. |  |
From the Far View Sites I drove on to the Mesa Top Loop, a road with winds its way around a number of sites that lets you see the development of Ancestral Puebloan culture in roughly chronological order.
 |
The earliest sites were “Pit Houses,” circular dwellings dug slightly down into the soil and roofed with domes made of timber and dried mud. |
| Later, they began to build rectangular structures near the pit houses, called “room blocks,” probably for storage, while the pit houses got deeper and deeper, making them cooler in summer and warmer in winter. |  |
 |
The pit houses eventually developed into kivas, while the people started living in the rectangular room blocks. The number of kivas around every site suggest that they still belonged to individual (extended) families. In modern Puebloan culture, kivas are entirely ceremonial. In the past, they may have passed through a period of being the family “den” or living room, gradually taking on ceremonial function. |
 |
Eventually they started building with stone instead of wood-frame, mud-daubed walls. This required a lot of effort— the stones are not adobe bricks, shaped from dried mud, they’re sandstone that had to be quarried out of the cliffs and laboriously carved into shape using harder stones as tools. Here, a village was built, abandoned, then centuries later another village built on top of it. While archaeologists have revealed the old foundations under the newer ones, the builders of the second village likely never knew the first was below the soil. |
The superimposed villages show the development of stone building: the earlier village had walls a single layer of stone thick, the later one had double-thickness walls. The people were looking to build sturdier, more permanent structures. Park service text suggests that fire was an issue, just as it is today: many of the old wood-frame buildings were abandoned after burning down.
Okay, I’ve been going chronological in order to build suspense for the really amazing sites: the cliff dwellings.
 |
They’re all over the place, tucked into virtually every crevice in the cliffs. Some small… |
| …some large. This is Cliff Palace, the largest cliff dwelling in North America.
All of these cliff dwellings represent the pinnacle of the Ancestral Puebloans’ architectural and engineering skill. |
 |
For all the effort that obviously went into building them, the cliff dwellings were a late and short-lived feature of the culture. They first began to build and move into the cliff dwellings around 1200 AD, after nearly a thousand years thriving on the mesa top, but by 1300 AD they abandoned the cliff dwellings as well and left the area altogether.
 |
Square Tower House. Although no one was in a position to know it at the time, until the mid 1800s that square tower was the tallest building in North America. |
| “Fire Temple.” This is a plaza, not a residence, matching the design of spaces in the modern pueblos used for celebrations and festivals. The white plaster along the back wall is original to the site, and though too faded to see in the photograph it’s painted with images of clouds and dancing figures. |  |
 |
Pulling back the camera a bit to see the whole site, the plaza is on the left of this picture, the buildings where people lived on the right. |
Why did the Ancestral Puebloans abandon the area, especially after the enormous effort of building all these cliff dwellings? The story used to be that they “mysterious vanished” around 1300AD, but in fact they didn’t— we know exactly where they went, they migrated south to the present-day pueblos where they still live today, using much of the same architecture as back then (even some of the same buildings: the Taos Pueblo, still occupied today, was founded right around that time).
There is a mystery about why they left. The modern Puebloans’ oral histories tell of leaving the Mesa Verde area, but the only reason they give is that “it was time.” Depletion of game, running out of timber as the last trees were cut down to make farmlands, prolonged drought, and conflict with other tribes (or within different clans of the Puebloans themselves) have all been suggested, and all of those things might have been going on at once, so that the place where this culture had thrived for a thousand years was simply no longer suitable.
Balcony House, one of the later cliff dwellings constructed, may provide a clue: the vertical wall dividing the site down the center cuts off half of it from access to the “seep spring,” the water source found at the back of almost all the cliff dwelling alcoves. Water had become such a precious resource that the people living here were in conflict with their own clan over access to it. It could be that all the cliff dwellings were built to move the people close to, and defend, the remaining water sources.
Whatever was happening, whatever had gone wrong, it looks like the cliff dwellings were a last-ditch attempt to hang on in the Mesa Verde area. But it wasn’t enough. By 1300 AD, not only the mesa but the entire Four Corners region had been completely abandoned, as the Puebloans migrated south to where they still live today.
Okay, I’ve droned on long enough and I’ve been more textbookish than usual for what’s supposed to be a trip journal. It’s just a really cool story, and I love that the park’s exhibits let you follow it chronologically, and actually see the ancient people’s culture develop and change over time as you walk or drive from one site to the next.
But getting back to journal matters— with so much closed, today I saw all of Mesa Verde that’s open. I have another day to fill tomorrow. What will I do with it?
Trip Report:
Miles driven today: 29.4
Total miles so far: 4700.6
