Mesa Verde

One of the main reasons for this trip I'm on is to visit Mesa Verde National Park. The park did not disappoint. It just boggles the mind at how and way these people, call The Ancient Puebloens by the park service, built these dwellings. I was surprised to learn that there were so many of them. I forget the total number but it was a lot. Also, they had pit dwellings on top of the mesa as well. They were primarily farmers, building and working fields on the mesa. They got to the cliff dwellings by hand and toe holds they cut into the cliffs. No ladders. Lots of them must have not survived the climb.

You can't actually go into any of the cliff dwellings on you own. They can only be visited by a ranger lead tour. The most popular tour is to The Cliff Palace. You still can't go into the dwellings here, but you can look inside a couple of them. It's just unbelievable how the Puebloens managed to get all the stone blocks, lumber, plaster, etc. down to these dwellings. Notice the petroglyphs on the wall of this vertical shaft.

This was another site I got to visit. I like it much better. It was a little more difficult to get to, so the group was considerably smaller. Here we got to wonder around some, look into the rooms, see the backs of the dwellings by the cliff wall. It's assumed that in the backs they stored their food.

There is a road running around the mesa with several viewpoints of other cliff dwellings. You can see 6 or so from the road. Like the ranger said, there are lots more.

The Puebloens had settled in the area for centuries. Not only did they farm the mesas, but other areas as well, where they build pueblos. There are supposedly hundreds of these, many not yet discovered. I stopped at this one off the highway a ways between Cortes and The Needles Area. Notice how they actually put designs in the walls as they were constructing them.