Mesa Verde National Park

September 27, 2025

Today Thursday September 25, we headed to Mesa Verde National Park. While the park is stunning all by itself and would take days to explore, we concentrated on 2 of the parks biggest attractions. As a background to what we saw , for almost 800 years, the Ancestral Pueblo people built successful and thriving communities on the mesas and in the cliffs of Mesa Verde. Today, the park protects their rich cultural heritage and offers visitors a spectacular window into the past. This is a World Heritage Site.

We stopped first for a park ranger tour of the Wetherill Mesa - Long House. While there are over 600 cliff sites in the park. this is one of the largest. The Long House fills a 298 foot long sandstone alcove. It had 150 rooms, 21 kivas (family sacred spaces/rooms) and housed anywhere from 80-90 people. We learned that while the Pueblo people occupied the mesas for 800 years, they only built these structures in the sandstone alcoves for the last 100 years that they were in the area ( approx 1180’s to 1290’s). While most everything they needed to build these structures was obtained nearby , there is evidence that the peoples traded for goods as far away as South America. We also learned that while everything now is the color of the rocks, when the village was occupied, the rocks were plastered over and the plaster was in all different colors, including blue, red, yellow, black and white. Pictures don’t do the area justice, but enjoy the photos.

Laura and Bob were headed down the trail to meet our guide. It was obvious that there had been a fire here. I think it was 20 years ago and caused by a lightening strike. We were told it takes over 200 years to grow back the pines that were lost.

Bob contemplating his life choices again.

We saw this tarantula on our way in.

Down we went.

And saw these views.

Laura and I were ready to be amazed! And we were! Look at this cool community in the alcove.

We had to climb several different times to move around in the village/community.

Of course we had our ranger talk and found out that in addition to living spaces, there were weaving rooms, milling rooms, store rooms and ceremonial spaces (kivas).

In the picture above, the wood here is over 800 years old. Mostly it was used to build the ladders, balconies, roofs and floors to 2nd stories. Below our park ranger was showing us that each of these inhabited alcove had a seep spring for community water. The water would seep through the limestone and meet the clay below it and would seep out.

The Long House has been partially reconstructed to teach us about the way of the Pueblo culture. Below are some very faint petroglyphs. I could clearly see a hand to the right and I think there is a horse to the left.

Here’s just a few more angles, then we moved on.

Next we went to the Cliff Palace. This is the largest cliff dwelling in North America and is an architectural masterpiece. Most of it was built between 1260 to 1280AD. The alcove is about 315 feet wide by 90 feet deep by 60 feet high. It has 150 rooms, 75 constructed open areas, 21 kivas and was inhabited by 100-120 people. Check out the valley that the people living in this community looked out at every day.

Cliff House as seen from above.

Families all lived together: aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, all the generations occupying the same space.

It appears that after living in these cliff dwelling for just under 100 years, the Pueblo people moved out of the area due to drought in the mid to late 1220’s and moved to the Rio Grande area to the south.