With the weather improving, we decided to go visit Mesa Verde. The entrance to the park was only about 9 miles out of town, but there was a 45 minute drive to get to the museum and cliff dwellings. We stopped at Subway on the way out of town and ate our sandwich as we stopped at an overlook of the valley. The park road meandered up the mesa with a few switch backs and we even went through a tunnel. The tops of the mesas were above 8000’ and valley floor was around 6000’, so it was about a 2000’ climb. The visitor’s center was closed for the season, but the museum, which sat on a canyon rim above one of cliff dwellings, was open. The museum was small, but actually quite nice. Jan bought a magnet, some postcards and had her passport stamped. We looked at the exhibits at the museum for about ½ hour. I wondered why these Native Americans lived up in these mesas and not down in the valley, where it seemed to be much nicer. As it turns out, most of the native population did live in the valley, while these peoples chose to live up in the mesas, just as people choose to live in different parts of the country today. They dry farmed on the mesa tops and lived under the natural protection of the cliff overhangs for hundreds of years up until about 1300 AD.
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| Spruce Tree House from the trail top |
We hiked the trail from the back of the museum about 100’ down into a small canyon to look at the Spruce Tree House dwellings. The walls are made of mud brick and the rooms are really tiny. In some places there are 3 stories with balconies. They had dug a lot of these round holes about 14’ in diameter and about 9' or 10’ deep called Kivas. The roof was made of tree branches with bark and mud and there was a square hole in the top where a ladder is placed for access.
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| Dave at the Spuce Tree House |
Of course, the roofs where gone long ago, but the park service re-built the roof on one of them, so Jan & I climbed down into to one to have a look. It must have been nice and cool in the summer and warm in the winter as there was a place for a fire in the center and a ventilation shaft.
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| Cliff Palace |
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| Jan climbing out of the canyon |
After we walked back out of the canyon, filled out our post cards and mailed them at the tiny 1 woman post office that they had there. We went back into the museum and bought tickets for the 4 o’clock ranger guided tour of the Cliff Palace, which was another ruin a few miles away. When we arrived at the top of the trail head, the ranger told us that we would have to climb several 3 meter ladders. This made Jan very nervous as she did not like climbing ladders. This I didn’t know, but as I remember back to all of our house fixing and painting days, she never did climb any really high ladders, but I just assumed that was because my job was to do it. As it turned out, the ladder climbing wasn’t as bad as we had thought and it was actually quite fun. This cliff house was a lot like the other cliff house only bigger. The ranger did a good job of telling us about the daily life of the cliff dweller. It was interesting that the average height of a man was only about 5’2” to 5’4” and he only lived to be 25 to 35 years old. The woman died even younger. They were married at 13, had 6 kids (3 of which died either at childbirth or an early age) before they were 20. Some people on the tour remarked that they must have had little time to pass on their culture to their children before they died. I thought of how fast the generations must have passed!
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