Mesa Verde
I first saw Anasazi (now “Ancestral Puebloans”) ancient cliff dwellings, mesa top and canyon ruins in the late 1970's on my first trip to the southwest and was immediately fascinated. Although then current Pueblo and Hopi oral traditions held that the ancient ones had moved south centuries earlier, probably because of drought, to the Rio Grand and Little Colorado areas, there still seemed some mystery surrounding their disappearance from the cliff dwellings. My first visit to Mesa Verde National Park was in 2000, an all too quick overview without a chance to explore anything in detail.
In July 2007, I traveled with members of my New York City camera club with which I am still fairly active despite living 135 miles away, to southwest Colorado. The trip included an opportunity to spend nearly 2½ days in the park, the nation’s only National Park established for the purpose of preserving a cultural heritage rather than a particular landscape, plant or animal. We had no identifiable plan to “attack” the park in order to maximize our experience, but our car headed immediately for the visitor center when we arrived in the late afternoon. Then a self-guided tour of Spruce Tree House nearby took us down into our first cave dwelling where, in hindsight, we explored too hastily. A loop drive to survey the stops along Chapin Mesa followed as we looked for difficult mid-summer sunset vistas. Finally our day ended with motel check-in and dinner.
The next morning after breakfast our entire group headed into the park from Cortez where we were staying. First stop was the Visitor’s Center for three dollar tickets for ranger guided tours of Balcony House and Cliff Palace that morning and afternoon with a special photographic evening repeat tour of Cliff Palace a couple of hours later. Our experience was set up perfectly at the base of the entrance into Balcony House as we stared up, anxiously, at the 60-foot log ladder we were to climb. The ladder negotiated, we still had a couple of tight spots, including a 12-foot tunnel through which we had to crawl to access the ancient entrance to the village.
After Balcony House, Cliff Palace was almost a snap, even twice, as we climbed ladders, hiked paved trails and explored these thirteenth century enclaves, at times simply awed by what lay before us.
Our final day allowed us to explore surface sites on Chapin Mesa which interested us and to switch over to Wetherill Mesa for a self-guided tour of Step House and a ranger guided tour of Long House, for me, the most magnificent in terms of the way in which its expanse filled the curvature of the cliff those ancient builders had chosen.
