After a stop in the visitors center to view the park video and buy the tickets for the sites we wanted to tour we headed out to our first stop - Spruce Tree House. Mesa Verde National Park preserves spectacular reminders of the ancient Indian Culture which is believed to have arrived in this area about 550 AD. Beginning about 1200 AD Ancestral Pueblo people moved from living on top of the mesa to these villages they built beneath the overhanging cliffs.
The path to get from the top of the mesa down to Spruce Tree house has quite a few switchbacks. It is an easy path down but during the walk up in this higher elevation you really feel how thin the air is to breathe.
Every cliff dwelling in the park has kivas, sunken round rooms that they now believe were used as a spiritual place, a work area or as a social gathering place. In this photo of a Kiva, the roof is gone so you can see the ventilator (rectangular hole at the floor level), the banquette (raised ledge around the kiva), the air deflector (small wall in front of the ventilator) and the fire pit (in front of the air deflector). You can just see the small hole near the fire pit. This is the sipapu which represents the opening through which man emerged onto the face of the earth. There are six pillars, known as pilasters, which supported the beams of the roof.
One of the Kivas at Spruce house had the roof and the entrance where you could climb the six foot ladder into the kiva just as the ancestral pueblo people did.
Here is a shot of me climbing on the ladder inside the Kiva.
And, here is a shot of Mark at the entrance to the Kiva so you can get a feel for the original dimension.
A very helpful ranger took the "we were there" photo in front of Spruce Tree House.
We took the Mesa Top Loop Drive tour with one of the highlights being the Square Tower House. This is the tallest dwelling in the park, a four story, 26 foot high tower with about 60 of the original 80 room remaining.
As you drive the loop you realize that the area consists of canyon after canyon, after canyon. Here is Mark standing at an overlook of Navajo Canyon.
...crawl through an 18 inch wide and 12 foot long tunnel. Here is Mark's photo of me entering the tunnel
And here is Mark coming out of the tunnel
then you just have a 60 foot open cliff face with stone steps and two 10-foot ladders to get out of the Balcony House. It is pretty obvious by now as to why they call this and "adventurous tour!"
The next tour was the signature sight at Mesa Verde National Park, Cliff Palace. This is also the largest cliff dwelling in the park. Quite spectacular isn't it!!
We enjoyed some delicious regional cuisine at the park. For lunch we had a Navajo taco which is basically all the ingredients in a normal taco but instead of a tortilla it is placed on fry bread. For dinner we stopped at Metate Restaurant at Far View Lodge and enjoyed this very impressive signature dish. It was so interesting I had to take a picture!
After a nice relaxing dinner with great views from 8,000 feet we enjoyed coffee and dessert. We then had just enough time to travel back to the Morefield campground amphitheater for the 9 pm ranger talk on "Big Cats."
It was quite a long day but we truly enjoyed our visit to this unique National Park.
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