Mesa Verde

We spent the next two days exploring Mesa Verde National Park… and it was really awesome. A lot of the park is not accessible to the general public because of the fragile state of many of the ruins (which I can understand) and other parts can only be seen if you go on a guided tour. Kimbal and I decided to go on two tours: the balcony house and the cliff palace tours. Our cliff palace tour was packed (well over 40 people on the tour) and you more or less walk around the outside of the cliff dwelling. It was still really cool, given that the dwelling is in such good condition (about 70% is untouched original) and its immense size! The guide said that the current theory is that the dwelling was more of an administrative center for the community (maybe where they store and distribute crops), rather than people’s homes.

The balcony house tour was really neat because we were able to walk throughout the dwelling and we were lucky to be in a small tour group (only 8 people). The tour required climbing up and down a bunch of ladders and stairs and squeezing through tight spaces:

Our guide also believed that this dwelling was not your normal cliff dwelling home, but, instead was a spiritual center where they observed the moon, which dictated the growing season. There were several circular depressions in the floor, and on the solstice the moon beam through a window outlines the depressions (or something to that effect). It was really, really cool. And, because the dwellings are in such good condition, with a little imagination, I could picture what the community must have been like.

We visited a few more cliff dwellings and pit houses that were open to the general public. They were ok, but nowhere near as cool as the guided tours. Our last stop in the park was a hike out to some well preserved petroglyphs, which archeologists think describe the migration of the native people from their entry into the world (through a mystical hole in the Grand Canyon) and their break-up into different tribes. My favorite was the goat tribe, shown in the photograph below.