Tales of a Travel Photographer

Places to see in Colorado: Our Mesa Verde Itinerary

Often in the US, I have taken an exit on a freeway, pulled into a side road to follow a sign claiming a historical site only to find a structure 80-100 years old. So on a 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 in 2008.

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 gorgeous the Cliff Palace and Balcony House. After a quick lunch, we visited the museum and the Spruce Tree House before retiring

Day 3: August 31st 2008: We drove off the Chapin Mesa to the Wetherill 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 imaginary line that divides BC from AD. There are many ancient settlements that can be found around Mesa Verde - specifically in Chaco in New Mexico, Utah and Arizona. The residents of these settlements were called Anasazi - a Navajo word that was wrongly interpreted as the Ancient Ones. The word also means the Ancient Enemy and 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 abundant 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 pit houses. A pit house 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 pit houses and started to build multi-storied brownstones. A group of houses usually had a common community place called a Kiva, which similar to a pit house, 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 caused this move. After all there were seven thousand Anasazis in Mesa Verde. They start moved into the alcoves and started building entire villages .

The buildings are complex and exotic 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 Wetherill 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 named 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

Standing on top of the mesa, looking down at the Cliff Palace, it is difficult to not feel like a scientist looking down at a crucible through a microscope, a scope that cuts through the dimension of time along with distance. Tucked into the natural alcove just below the precipitous edge of the mesa, is a magical little village that was inhabited by the Anasazi not too long ago, just over eight centuries. It is a touch difficult to call them ruins for they are well preserved in the arid climate of the southwest, it almost feels like if I wait a little more, I will see Anasazi spilling out of the adobe houses and this ancient village will yet again be agog with activity.

The Anasazi built this city in the 12th century, lived here for a little over 80 years and then out of the blue, a mystery that has yet to be deterministically explained,  evacuated it.

A series of steps snake down lazily to the abandoned village, a luxury Anasazi did not enjoy. They employed hand and toes hold dug into the face of the cliff that dropped vertically down from the mesa, scaled several times a day by men and women to get food and water to the village. Standing on the floor of the alcove, suspended several hundred feet from the canyon floor, it is clear that not only were the Anasazi prodigious yet minimalistic builders but they were also very, very clever. The village has been built precisely inside the shadow line of the sun at high noon in summer yet allowing for enough warmth in winter when the sun moves southwardly. Overall, the city/village is not built to a specific plan. The natural lines of the alcove are used to decide where to build what. 

A series of Kivas line the front. These circular pits lined with brick with six pilasters for the roof, narrow banquets along the inner wall, and deflectors to prevent smoke from the fire-pit flooding the kiva held great importance in the Anasazi culture. Besides being used for ceremonial rituals, it was a gathering place for the adults to congregate in the evening – just like the piazzas in Italy or the Banyan tree in villages in India.

This adobe adorned tower with pinyon-juniper logs jutting out houses four floors, each with one apartment. Each apartment is miniscule with just enough room for a family to curl and sleep.

This majestic building has been romantically named the Chieftain’s house though there is no known evidence if Anasazi ever organized themselves under a tribal chief. Built on top of a fallen rock, it has 4 asymmetrical levels that reach all the way to the roof of the alcove. The rock has a major crack that has continued upwards into the main building. When the site was being stabilized in early 1900, engineers went below the rock with metal and mortar. To their utter surprise, they saw that the Anasazi engineers had been in exactly same spot - 800 years ago - armed with mud  and pinyon-juniper logs. 

Behind the house, along the roof of the alcove, a natural ledge has been converted into storage rooms.The attic has exactly as many windows as the number of kivas in Cliff Palace - 23.  A huge cache of ancient corn can still be found in these rooms.

In the evening, we were across the Soda Canyon. We had to be within 10 yard radius of the spot Wetherill and Mason allegedly stood in December 1888 looking for their lost cattle. Instead they discovered the Cliff Palace- the first time ever that a Caucasian eye landed on this stonework.I get goose bumps just thinking of what that moment would be.

I mean, I have goose bumps now!

Balcony House, Mesa Verde: Were the Anasazi Defending?

The dreaded 30 foot ladder used today for entering the Balcony House is "modern." It is not known to have been used either by Anasazi or by the earliest arrivals at the Balcony House – S E Osborne, W H Hayes, Charles Mason, Virginia McClurg, Gustav Nordenskiold or even Jesse Nussbaum.

“All cliff sites are defensive in some form, used like castles, though in a very different context than Medieval Europe. Major cliff dwellings show up in the southwest during times of migration, environmental stress, and clear evidence of conflict.” Craig Childs – naturalist traveller and one of my favorite authors - wrote to me, “There may have been other reasons for Balcony House, but when I look at it I see people taking cover.”

Craig’s word is the last word for me when it comes to the cliff dwellings of the southwest. Balcony House has many features, natural and man made, that makes it anything \but a defensive structure.

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

A series of hand and toeholds have been ground into the hard rocks by the ancient ones. This precarious route was the entrance to the Balcony House when it was actively occupied. (If you visit Balcony house today, you would exit by climbing these steps.) A misstep means a two thousand feet tumble to the bottom of the Soda canyon. The enemy would have to carefully tiptoe in broad daylight in a single file, there is no way to storm Balcony house en masse.

The steps end on a tiny ledge that can accommodate at the most half a dozen people at the same time.

The attacker, exchanging vertigo for claustrophobia, would then have to crawl through a 12 foot long tunnel built ingeniously by filling in a natural gap between two boulders. At the center of the tunnel is a strategically left stone that complicates the crawl and ejects the entrant in probably the worst attacking posture – horizontal, head facing down and foot kind of stuck.

The tunnel opens into the North plaza. North Plaza has a few typical Anasazi rooms towards the rear and a small moss covered water spring, sufficient for a few residents, probably indicating that the house was not inhabited around the year. The wall between North Plaza and Lower Plaza was built after the house was completed, leaving a just a tiny natural gash between rocks, another reason to believe the house was converted into a defensive post.  

The North Plaza has a beautiful view of the canyon and has a retaining wall that was carefully stabilized by Gustav Nordenskiold using precisely Anasazi building techniques and style. The Plaza has some of the best preserved balconies - parapets running along the outer wall of the house wall – supposedly used by Anasazi to cross from one room to another. It is these balconies that gives the house its name.

Without any documented Anasazi evidence, we are left to using our imagination to conclude that a civilization advanced enough to live as independent clans yet belong to a larger complex socio-structure and if the tall complex in Cliff Palace indeed belonged to a chieftain, then this would be the place his advisors would choose as place to back into if invaded. 

My two favorite books about 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 reads like a novel,  beautifully rendered yet not missing any scientific details. (The one I got from the library was a cyclostyled copy of her original report! How I wish the photos were colored). Gustav's work, on the other hand, reads nostalgia.

 

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