Wanderlust

Places to see in Colorado: Our Mesa Verde Itinerary

I have often taken an exit on a freeway or pulled into a side road in US following a sign claiming a historical building only to find a structure 80-100 years old. I find it funny especially when almost any temple in almost any village in India is on an average 300 years old and neglected.

So on the flight home, one day, from a business trip, when I read about the 13th century cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde in the airline magazine, I had to go.

We visited the Mesa Verde National Park on the labor day weekend this year.

Here is what our itinerary looked like

Day 1: August 29th 2008: We took a early morning Alaska flight from Seattle to Denver, rented a car, drove 500 miles south west to Mesa Verde and parked ourselves in the beautiful Far View Lodge

Day 2: August 30th 2008: We took the ranger lead trips to Cliff Palace, and the Balcony House. After a quick lunch we visited the museum and the Spruce Tree House before retiring

Day 3: August 31st 2008: We drove of the Chapin Mesa to the Wetherhill Mesa to visit Long House and the Step House. In the afternoon we drove out of Mesa Verde to visit the four corners monument and Ship Rock. We then stayed at Days End Inn in Durango.

Day 4: September 1st 2009 We started out early in the morning and took the San Juan Skyway to arrive back at Denver and then took the evening flight home.

I really enjoyed Mesa Verde. The startlingly beautiful South West scenery and the unique history of the ancient people makes this place a must visit.

Native Americans have been staying in the Four Corners region since the almost imaginary line that divides BC from AD. There are many ancient settlements that can be found around Mesa Verde - specifically in Chacho in New Mexico, Utah and Arizona. The residents of these settlements are called Anasazi - a Navajo word which was wrongly interpreted as the Ancient Ones. The word incidentally also means the Ancient Enemy and hence the politically correct word nowadays is Ancestral Pueblons.  But before they were Pueblons, they were known as the Basket Makers. From 1 AD to about 550 AD, the people were nomads - more hunters and gatherers than farmers and were so named for the beautiful baskets they wove using the abundantly found Yucca.

The mesa is about 7000 feet above ground level and much cooler and wetter than the surrounding arid flat ground. The top is almost green - minus the gnarled  back stumps left such by forest fires. The Anasazi - I will continue to use that word, it just sounds so beautiful on the tongue - used the intricately designed baskets they wove to carry things, store water and cook food. (Food was cooked by dropping hot stones and pieces of coal in the basket).

The Anasazi moved to Mesa Verde around 550 AD, discovered bow and arrows and started building pithouses. A pithouse is a depression dug into the ground with one single circular room - sometimes two - which is then covered with a mud roof supported by wooden pillars. As they settled on the Mesa, they started to harvest corn. They also leaned to make pots. The period between 550 and 750 AD is called the modified Basket Maker Period.

Baskets on the left, impressive - almost modern - mugs on the right. These can be seen at the Museum near Spruce Tree House.

Between 750 AD and 1100 AD, the Anasazi moved out of pithouses and started to build multi-storeyed brownstones on the mesa. A group of houses usually had a common community place called a Kiva, which similar to a pithouse, was a depression with a mud roof. The kivas were used as a daily meeting place and ceremonies. The kivas were a very important part of the Anasazi life.

Around 1190, the Anasazi started to move into the alcoves in the cliffs. It is possible that scarcity of land on the mesa top lead to this move as there were close to seven thousand Anasazi in Mesa Verde. Not only did they start moving to the alcoves, they started building entire villages in them.

The buildings are complex and exotic. Most of the buildings are build south west facing trapping the afternoon sun for heat and leaving the place cooler during the day. Kivas are abundant and mandatory. Every nook and cranny of the alcove is used optimally including storage attics build high up into the ledge.

Then around 1300 AD, the Anasazi were gone.

They moved away from Mesa Verde never ever to return again. The reason for the exodus is not known.

The Anasazi were extremely complex people. They lived a social and richly cultural life. They lived as tight clans and protected their neighborhood fiercely. They were also tremendously violent. Many Pueblons sites - not in Mesa Verde - has evidence of war and rampage, murder and gory, arson and cannibalism.

The Navajo and Ute, who moved into the area a couple of hundred years after the Anasazi left, were tight lipped about the dwellings. On December 18, 1888 Richard Wetherhill and Charles Mason - local ranchers - discovered what is today known as Cliff Palace while looking for lost cattle. Over the next 3 years, they searched the canyons, discovered and name many of the sites known today. In 1891, the site was extensively documented and photographed by a Swedish archeologist called Gustaf Nordenskiold. Nordenskiold, on his way back to Sweden, took a large horde of pottery and other artifacts found in Mesa Verde. 

This inspired the Antiquities law signed in 1906, also the year when Mesa Verde was declared a National Park by President Ted Roosevelt.

Mesa Verde is the only National Park in US for structure built by mankind.

Mesa Verde Photo Gallery:

Cliff Palace at Mesa Verde

I got up early in the morning and rushed to the Cliff Palace to get early light on the beautiful sandstone. Unfortunately, I got my directions wrong. Cliff Palace faces west while The Balcony house faces east. Cliff Palace is a signt best visited in evenings.

The photo below is a collage made by stitching over 12 discrete photos and the original size is capable of providing an awesome detail on zoom

Later in the day, we grabbed a big brunch at the far View Terrace and stopped at the visitor center to buy tickets. In July 2000, Mesa Verde experienced a major fire which came within miles of the Visitor Center. Preparing for the worst, the local had doused the visitor center with over 10,000 gallons of fire retardant The visitor center survived by the skin of the teeth.

The Cliff Palace, Balcony house and Long View House need tickets that can only be purchased at the Far View visitor center. The ticket - $3 a piece - includes the ranger guided tours to these sites.

Cliff Palace is the largest of the cliff dwellings in Mesa Verde. With about 150 rooms and 23 kivas, at its peak occupation, housed about 500of the Anasazi. The ruins are in very good shape....

The structure seen in this picture presides majestically over the ruins with 4 levels reaching all the way to the roof of the alcove. Based on its location and size, Archaeologists theorize that this was possible the dwelling for the clan chieftain or the high priest.

There are two things worth noting in this picture.

Look at the bottom center of the picture. The structure is built on a fallen rock. The rock has developed a crack that has crawled up into the main structure. When the site was first being stabilized in early 1900, engineers went below the rock with metal and mortar. To their surprise, they saw that the Anasazi engineers had been in the exact same spot - 800 years ago - armed with adobe mud  and pinyon Juniper logs. 

Behind the structure, along the roof of the alcove, a natural ledge has been built out for storage.The attic has exactly as much windows as the kivas in Cliff Palace and still has a cache of ancient corn.

The site has characteristic kivas - with six pilasters for the roof support, narrow banquets, deflector walls to prevent smoke from the fire-pit flooding the kiva and the sipapu.

Rhea was fascinated by the religious significance of the sipapu - a little hole in the ground that represents the entry orifice of mankind.

 

 

 

We were at the Cliff Palace right around high noon.

Notice, behind me in the picture, how the ruins have been built inches inside the shadow line.

The Anasazi did not chose their alcoves - grabbing any and all real estate that they could lay their hands on. Neither are any of the sites built to a specific plan, the natural lines of the alcove deciding what needs to be built where. 

That meant Improvising was high on the basic principles of design.

Preservation of heat must have been high up on their minds given how heavily these sites gets snowed in winter - Spruce Tree House is the only house open year around, all other sites are closed down. 

 

 

Having extensively read up on the site and the general Anasazi way of life before being in situ allowed me to detach myself from the group and the ranger's monologue and wander freely amidst the ruins.

I got tons of photos as if I was the only person on the ruins.

The picture here depicts one of many towers on the site - a four storeyed structure - sans any built staircases that obviously points to the usage of wooden ladders.

Interestingly, I do not remember reading any of the excavations inventories listing discovery of wooden ladders . The dry Colorado climate  helps excellent preservation of wood - as is with the abundance of  "drying racks" in every ruin.

So the question is, where are the ladders?

Or rather, how did Anasazi get to the penthouse?

We exited the site using the steps built in the last century by CCC.

It is interesting how most of the modern construction on the site including Jesse Nusbaum's 1910 modifications, cleanly merges with the ancient building style.

The steps seem ancient - and are - if you discount the timescale. 

But then timescale does funny tricks to ones mind. 

I remember a lunch in Egypt.

As we sat during a late lunch during the sent of our tour, our guide tried to point of a nearby ruin. 600 AD he proudly declared. Neither the Askis not the Shindes moved their eyes away from the table. When you have seen and roamed structures built 5000 years before present, 1400 year old structures seem unimpressive.

I made sure I did not repeat that mistake. I enjoyed every step that took me away from the Cliff Palace (and closer to the Balcony house)

The picture below is taken approximately within 10 yards radius of the alleged spot Wetherhill and Mason stood in December 1888 looking for the lost cattle and discovering the ruins - the first time ever that a Caucasian eye was leads on this stonework.

The picture is taken near the fire temple lookout. This is an awesome spot to be at around sunset  time (which is when I took them ), though it is definitely not the best spot. If given a chance again, I would take the last of the tours of the cliff palace - around 6:00 PM - not only is it less crowded, it presents the best light to photograph Cliff Palace.

Balcony House

Balcony house is less than half a mile from Cliff Palace.

The cliff dwelling resides in an eye-socket shaped alcove close to the top of the mesa. The site is based about 2000 feet above the floor of the Soda canyon and faces east overlooking one of the largest drainage of the Mancos river. 

While the Cliff Palace is the largest dwelling in  Mesa Verde and Long View has the oldest kivas, Balcony House is without doubt my favorite. 

The site enjoys many natural and unique features that has led some archeologists to firmly believe that this was a defensive structure.

If we use the sporadic documented historical evidence - and our imagination - to  conclude a civilization advanced enough to live as independent clans yet belonging  to a larger community and complex socio-structure and that the tall complex in Cliff Palace belonged to a chieftain, then this would be the place his advisors would choose as a backup back-out place.

Except that there does not seem to be an escape route for the King in case the fortification does not do its job. . 

 

Balcony house is not for the faint hearted. The picture on the right shows a wooden box at the Far View center for the to-be visitor to experience the narrowest crawl-way in Balcony House. While Rhea is all smiles, the actual tunnel is nowhere that easy. Especially if you are not wearing something that covers your knees or have a long lower body, or are carrying tons of stuff in your back pack (like photography equipment), 

The two must read books on Balcony House are Kathleen Fiero's "Balcony House: A history of cliff dwelling, Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado" and Gustav Nordenskiold's "The Cliff Dwellers of the Mesa Verde"

Kathleen's tome (the one I got is a cyclostyled copy of her original report)  is beautifully rendered without losing any of the scientific specifics (how I wish though the photos were colored). Gustav's work - that I am still midway through - reads nostalgic and wonderfully dated.

After several implicit and tacit warnings by the rangers to get people who are not up to it to dropout,  we walked from the top of the mesa to the base of the first ladder, before climbing 30 vertical - comparatively easy – feet.

This entry is "modern" and was not known to have been used either by Anasazi. Or by some of the earliest entrants - S E Osborne, W H Hayes, Charles Mason, Virginia McClurg, Gustav Nordenskiold or even Jesse Nussbaum. Finger and toe holds cut in rocks and rope ladders thrown over the edge were preferred methods.

The ladder landed us on the Lower Plaza that consists of 3 rooms.

The lower plaza is separated from the North Plaza by a narrow gap in the rocks and a vertical chute.

The chute and the narrow gap is an ideal place to swat enemies one by one, especially if one had the advantage of a medieval sword - no traces of which have been found. It is but obvious that rooms on this plaza are not much of a dwelling, probably just a storage of food and water.

The North Plaza has a beautiful view of the canyon and has a well maintained retaining wall.  The Plaza has some of the best preserved balconies - parapets running along the wall - allowing people to cross from one room on the second level to another (photo on the right). Hence the name - Balcony House.

The complex is beautiful and modern.

It fits the original description of a "brownstone in a hill" found in one of the original manuscripts about Mesa Verde.

If asked to guess, I would not date the construction to be more than a 150 years old and definitely not 1200 AD.  

 

The North Plaza with its 11 rooms, has the typical Anasazi architecture with plastered walls with dimple faces.

The mortar is rough hewn (especially if you compare it to the Inkan masonry roughly about the same timeframe) bolstered with little stones stuck into it .

Then you see the haunting T-Shaped doors and windows. Only Anasazi architecture has used this shape and the mystery behind it has never been solved.

The usual theories are heat loss prevention and convenience - wide at the top to allow people carrying a load balanced on their head an easy passageway.

 

 

 

 

 

 

You go through a narrow entrance and down some neatly cut steps to enter Kiva Plaza - so named for the two large kivas on the site. The North Plaza and the Kiva plaza seemed to have a door during prehistoric time that seems to have been blocked by a dividing wall by the Anasazi.

Water was - and is- a precious commodity in Mesa Verde. Balcony house has a little spring in the back (seen below), that has sufficient throughput for the number of people estimated to be living here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

On the left, you can see a view of the Kiva plaza

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo on the left shows ancient wall art - clusters of brown colored triangles - probably depicting, perhaps, the La Plata mountains.

Photo on the right,  shows the spring and the refuse area towards the back.  Note, the retaining wall is in much worse state than the one in North Plaza - Nordenskiold rebuilt most of what you see in North Plaza, though there is no documentation on the extent.

I waited for the group to clear to Kiva plaza, took one long look around, and headed towards the dreaded tunnel.

The tunnel is about 12 feet long, sufficiently wide and not very easy to crawl. In the middle of the tunnel is a big rock. Thankfully, the roof has been widened to allow one to concave across.   

Once you cross the tunnel, you see the precarious 60 feet long hand and toe holds. Claustrophobia gives way to vertigo

The wire mesh on the left and the chain on the right seem dicey especially if it gets windy.

It is amazing how the Anasazi scaled this staircase, often carrying a load - water or corn baskets - steps sometime covered with snow.

What a tough life it must have been. 

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