Day 3 - May 31, 2008 Last updated: 6/12/08 8:00pm PT
Got up early to get into Mesa Verde. Cortez is the closest town, so we spent last night there. Tonight we will stay in the park. The Mesa Verde Visitor’s Center is about 45 minutes from Cortez.
Mesa Verde is the reason for this trip; to see the cliff dwellings of the Anasazi. Seeing the cliff dwellings from afar wasn’t enough, we wanted to get inside one or two of them. There is limited access to some of the cliff dwellings. I should say, most dwellings you can’t even get to at all. To help protect the ones you can get to, you can only go on a park ranger led tour. You buy $3 tickets, which are only available one day in advance, in person, and they sell out quick in peak season. Not wanting to risk missing a tour of at least one of the dwellings, we found a way around the 1 day pre-purchase limitation. You can book a 4 hour ranger led bus tour in advance (like in February) on visitmesaverde.com. (Watch your credit card statement though, I just found out today that they billed us twice for this tour, once in February and once on the day of the tour. The person I spoke with at Mesa Verde said, “Yeah, that happens”). This guaranteed us access to at least one cliff dwelling, the Cliff Palace. Once we got to the park, we got $3 tickets to see the Long House for tomorrow. There is a rebuilt dwelling called the Spruce Tree House, that is easily accessible, and no tickets are required. Cliff Palace is partially rebuilt. The Long House is the least rebuilt of the ones you can visit.
Depending on how you pronounce it and where you look it up, ‘Anasazi’ means ‘ancient foreigners’, ‘ancient people’ or ‘ancient enemy’, so all the park signs have been changed to say “Ancestral Puebloans”. There are about 20 Native American tribes that claim to be descendants of the Anasazi. No one really knows for sure what happened. People have lived in this area for thousands of years. The Anasazi lived on top of Mesa Verde (which is actually a cuesta, not a mesa, which means it’s a slope). They farmed, they had houses. At some point, maybe due to drought and/or over population, they built and moved into the cliff dwellings, possibly freeing up more land for farming. The cliff dwellings were cooler (as in temperature, not “look how cool my cliff house is”) and places to get water. The cliff dwellings are at the bottom of the sandstone layer of rock, and water seeps through the sandstone. Somewhere in the 1200-1300’s the people moved away. There is no evidence of violence or cannibalism, at least none at Mesa Verde. No one will ever know for sure what the real story is. I’m starting to read a book called ‘Anasazi America’ by David E. Stuart, which was recommended by multiple park rangers. Maybe I’ll learn some more.
When I bought the tickets in February, the website said to meet the bus at the Far View Terrace. So we got there with plenty of time to spare. Not a soul to be seen. This seemed wrong. Denise went into the building and asked someone about the tour. He said go to the Visitor’s Center. Off we go. The Visitor’s Center sells the $3 tickets and isn’t open. Time’s running out for the 8am tour. I find a park ranger, I think I scared her, I walk quiet sometimes. She said our tour meets at the Far View Lodge. Off to the Lodge. There’s the bus. 7:59. Phew, I don’t like cutting it that close, especially since we were at the first place at 7:40. We got on the bus and it left the Lodge. First stop? Far View Terrace to pick up any people there! So we could have stayed there and been OK, but we got some bad information from a park employee and ran around like idiots so we didn’t miss the tour.
The bus tour stops at a few places before going to the Cliff Palace. We had an excellent park ranger. You don’t have much choice, but you want one of the old-timers for your park ranger. They know a lot more and the one we had today actually has met with the tribe elders to get some of the oral histories told to him.
A wild turkey. It eventually just laid down in the road.
Square Tower House
Here’s a Kiva with the roof removed.
Most sites are inaccessible
Cliff Palace, from across the canyon.
Getting into Cliff Palace requires climbing down the uneven stairs carved into the cliff. The stairs were built in the ’30s, before anyone thought of making all the stairs the same height, width and depth. The new OSHA rules state that visitors can only go up ladders and down stairs. No going down a ladder, or I guess they throw you in jail.
The way out is up.
By the park museum is the Spruce Tree House. It’s an easy walk to this site and it requires no additional admission fee. There’s a bit of a hill on the way out, but no stairs. The cool thing about this site is that they’ve rebuilt a kiva and they let you climb down the ladder to see what the inside is like. It’s quite spacious. I was able to stand up with plenty of headroom.
The closest hole in the ground is the ventilation shaft. The farther hole is the entrance to the kiva (with the ladder sticking out). This opening is also the exhaust hole because the firepit is directly below the ladder. I guess that keeps people from entering or leaving once the fire is lit.
In this interior view, you can see the opening of the ventilator shaft and the deflector stone. Although, I’m pretty sure the Anasazi didn’t have metal bars across the ventilator shaft.
We also stopped at the museum. Some interesting things to see, but I heard there used to be a mummified body on display. That’s not there anymore. We stayed at the Far View Lodge. It’s pretty old, but clean. The rooms are in multiple 1 story buildings, think small town motel. Each narrow room had a front door and a back door. Out back is a small deck. If the building was taller than one story, it would be a balcony instead of a deck. No TV, no AC. We didn’t need either. Although hot during the day, the elevation is somewhere around 7-8000 feet above sea level, so it cools dramatically at night. There’s WiFi in the lobby, and when the wind blew the right way, I was able to connect from our deck for a few minutes. There’s only one restaurant open for dinner, so bring your favorite credit card. I don’t remember much about the flavor of dinner, but desert was an incredibly thick and rich chocolate gnoche cake. Worth every penny.
While on the deck, we saw a deer strolling by. It would have been gone by the time I got to the camera, so I used the Internet Tablet to take this blurry shot.
