Mesa Verde

What a beautiful park! Bear and I blew through here in 1973 when we were on our way home to Seattle from Newport News, VA, his last duty station with the Air Force. Amazing how much better it is when you actually have time to see what there is to see. We decided that Mesa Verde was worth a whole day and since we didn’t get there until noon we stayed in the Park Lodge at Far View (guess why it has that name) overnight and finished our tour the next morning. The Lodge was nice. The rooms are motel style and scattered up a hillside. The desk clerk gave us one with a spectacular sunset view over Sleeping Ute Mountain so we sat on the deck, drank wine and watched the sky turn beautiful colors. As the sun was setting the airplane contrails were lit up so there were little white and pink streaks across the sky.


We took the tour of Cliff Palace, the largest of the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde. It was very spectacular. We heard all the explanations, but I still cannot imagine what would possess someone to move off the mesa top and build a place like this (where you go in and out by way of little tiny hand and foot holds cut into the vertical rock where if you miss your step the drop is hundreds of feet).


We also went to Spruce Tree House which is in a little more reasonable location – you don’t need a ladder to get to it. We had a great talk with the rangers there. They told us about the wild turkeys in the park. First off: the Ancient Puebloeans (Anaztazi is no longer politically correct) had two domestic animals – dogs and turkeys. Both lived with them in the cliff dwellings. Flash forward to today. The turkeys roam wild in the park, at Spruce Tree House the turkey buzzards used to hang out but one day they just moved out and the next the turkeys were hanging there. Now, as you recall turkeys don’t fly. So as dusk approaches they launch themselves off the mesa top and land in the big fir trees growing up from the shallow end of the canyon (occasionally in the morning the rangers find one that misjudged his flight pattern and splatted on the ground). They spend the night there safe from most predators and then in the morning launch out of the tree, land on the mesa top on the other side (it is a little lower) and then spend the day walking around the end of the canyon back to their original launch point. At Spruce Tree House there is a kiva that you can actually go into (by ladder through a hole in the roof). It was very interesting to actually be inside.


In the morning we went to see the remains of a large settlement in the middle of the mesa. It had been a large farming community. And then we did the drive around a mesa top. We got to see remains of dwellings/villages from the 900’s. And there were spectacular views of more cliff dwellings. We were struck by how similar the construction is between the ruins here and those we saw last spring in Europe that were built about the same time. Ancient North Americans did not come up with the wheel so the similarities to Europe of that same time stop there.
Farming village on mesa top

Views from the mesa

There are wild horses in the park – not mustangs, but horses that were released by the Indians at some point. And we saw a coyote! He looked back at us over his shoulder as if to say “You’ll never get your camera out in time.” and was off.
We did meet a tarantula on one of the overlook trails. Very large, very hairy.

Park mammal count: 13 – deer, chipmunk, big horn sheep, mountain goat, red squirrel, prairie dog, rabbit, buffalo, elk, red squirrel aka chickaree, pika, golden-mantled ground squirrel, least chipmunk, wild horses, coyote
Trip mammal count: 19 - deer, moose, chipmunk, big horn sheep, mountain goat, antelope, rabbit, mule deer, red squirrel aka chickaree, prairie dog, buffalo, ground squirrel, Abert’s squirrel, elk, pika, golden-mantled ground squirrel, least chipmunk, deer mouse, wild horses, coyote
Dollars saved on this trip with Park Pass: 116.00 +10 = $126