Page 6 of 12
Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado
And I discovered that my castles stand upon pillars of salt and pillars of sand
After I awoke to suddenly find the incredibly far view from the well named Far View Lodge in Mesa Verde National Park and after I got over the fact that horses were walking all over the place (Native Americans are apparently really into free range horses), I decided to make the best of my one full day in the park and see everything one can see in such short time, luckily for me a gung-ho National Park Ranger was ready to help. Unlike most other parks, Mesa Verde's five star attractions require timed tickets for ranger led tours, and the ready to help ranger quickly helped me create a "hard core" day that featured all three ticked cliff dwellings while taking into account the best light for photography. Each of the three tours would involve steep strenuous climbs and lots of ladders at high elevations (7,000 fasl) in the high desert heat, and there would be at least one case where I would be forced to climb on my hands and knees through a narrow, potentially claustrophobic 15 foot long tunnel. All of this sounded like a good idea to me.
The Ancient Puebloans (formerly known as the Anasazi until rather recently when someone realized that someone else thinks Anasazi is an insult) moved from the top of Mesa Verde and onto the cliffs sometime around 1200, the same time frame of the Fourth Crusade, Genghis Khan and Marco Polo (depending on your frame of reference). They were probably peaceful, probably liked to eat animals and corn (in no particular order), and probably did everything imaginable to utilize local yucca plants (Ancient Puebloans were really into yucca plants). They also weren't exactly giants- the average Ancient Puebloan was maybe five foot high. All those windows you see all over the place were really doors- they were kept small to keep heat in and kept above floor level to keep small children from easily escaping.
Life wasn't especially easy for all those short Ancient Puebloans and they all had short life spans to prove it. Complicating matters are two explanations of inherent, systematic life shortening practices. First of all they held community and religious ceremonies in underground circular pits called kivas (which would have been covered over with a wooded roof structure). Inside fire and smoke (and possibly inhaling said smoke) were likely a ritualistic part of their everyday life, causing archeologists to theorize that lung cancer might have been an issue. More provable are the dangers of eating a lot of corn. Yes, corn. The Ancient Puebloans used to like to grind their corn to a fine paste but unfortunately they used the locally soft sandstone rocks to do the grinding, meaning that all that corn had alarmingly large amounts of rough sandstone grit mixed right in. The tough sandstone plus the sugary sweet corn led to horrible dental and mouth conditions which led to complications and even earlier death (and archeologists have the Ancient Puebloan skulls to prove it). All things considered it sucked to be an Ancient Puebloan.
If you've ever wondered why those Ancient Puebloans abandoned their mesa top homes for the cliffsides then you've never been to Mesa Verde. The cliffs have natural shelters, a geological condition caused by years of erosion of a mesa top sandstone layer. Once the water leaking through the sandstone hit a harder shale layer it started to erode and create natural, open caves right in the cliff. Plus in those same locations natural springs would exist as water continued to filter right on through the stone. So if you had your choice of living on an unprotected mesa or a cliffside with a natural shelter and a water source where would you choose? I'm guessing you'd go with the cliff, even if meant a hell of a lot of climbing (and climbing and climbing...).
All of the cliff dwellings were a few hundred feet down the cliff, easy enough to get down to but hard as hell to get out of. Helping you all over the place were convenient and sturdy ladders which scaled the cliffs in no time, although never so quick as to spare your body the huffing and puffing that the unforgiving 7000 foot high elevation demands.
Outside the Step House Trail parking lot is clear evidence of the forest fires which have ravaged most of the park in the last few years. Mesa Verde has a lot of dead trees (not these burnt out trees but rather dead dry trees in a living forest) and gets a lot of dry lightning storms, put those two conditions together and bad things will eventually happen. Especially bad fires this past decades have burned down over half of the park but have created an added benefit of exposing hundreds and hundreds of additional mesa top archeological sites. So while fire is still bad, finding archeological sites is now good. It's all so confusing.
