Colorado

MESE VERDE NATIONAL PARK
To View Other Travel Logs And Photos
Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado

	 About an hour Northeast of Four Corners Monument, and only 45 minutes West of Durango, Mesa Verde National Park is located in the Southwest corner of Colorado.  Mesa Verde became a National Park in 1906 to preserve more than 4,000 archeological sites which sit atop the plateaus and in large alcoves in the walls of the sandstone canyons that cut through the mesa.  These sites are believed to be the homes of Ancestral Puebloans – the ancestors of the Hopis; or, as the Navajos refer to them, the Anasazis.  

	In about 550 A.D., the “ancient ones,” who had lived a nomadic life until then, settled in the Mesa Verde area, and began to farm on the plateaus and hunt in the canyons.  They built pit houses on the canyon rims, and occasionally in the canyon walls.  Over time, they began building above-ground houses with many rooms, including round circular rooms below ground, which are known as ceremonial Kivas.  In the 1200s, they took to building primarily cliff-dwellings.  As their society advanced, so did their masonry, from adobe and pole construction to skilled stone masonry (even more skilled than that of the Ancestral Puebloans living in Canyon de Chelly, but apparently not as advanced as those living in Chaco Canyon, which we unfortunately did not get too).  Archeologists estimate that these people lived in the Mesa Verde area until the 1300s, when they migrated south to Arizona and New Mexico (presumably due to drought and other factors) and settled among their kin already living in pueblos in these parts.

	During your stay at Mesa Verde, you can tour a few of these ancient villages by yourself, but for most of them, you need a ticket for a ranger guided tour.  These tours run nearly every hour starting at 9:00 am and they are really informative and interesting.  The ruins are amazing, particularly when you think about the people who inhabited them nearly a thousand years ago.  There are also some pretty good hikes in the park.  We took the Petroglyph Trail, which offered up some amazing views of the canyon, Petroglyphs at Pictograph Point (incorrectly named since the etchings are carved into the stone, not painted), and some great terrain, including a few scrambles up boulders, stone steps, and ladders.  

	Since the campground was closed for the season, as were some of the trails and ruins (they close in early October), we stayed at the Far View Lodge. The rooms were reasonable and clean, and the food at the restaurant was great (particularly since we had worked up a good appetite on our sunset hike in the cold).
TRAVEL LOG FOR US
COLORADO
To view photos of
Mesa Verde National Park: Colorado
To Continue To Read The US Travel Logs & View Photos