On to Colorado

30^th May Cortez Colorado

We drove back out of the park via Newspaper Rock which had many petroglyphs on it – although it
was difficult to tell which were original.

We drove from Utah into Colorado and immediately noticed how the countryside changed from rocks and scrub to grassed areas, and then into farming land with ranches of cattle and horses.  We also spotted alpaca in some of the fields.

 
After settling into the campsite we spent the afternoon at the Anasazi cultural museum.  The Anasazi lived in these regions 1500 years ago, building pit houses and farming the land.  They then moved down below the mesas and built cliff dwellings such as Mesa Verde.

31^st May – Mesa Verde Nat Park

Mesa Verde Nat Park contains thousands of dwellings both up on the mesas, and below the overhangs as cliff dwellings dating from 500 to 1200AD.  Only a few of the dwellings have been excavated and open to the public.  Some dwellings the public have free access to but three others are
by tour only; we booked all three of the Ranger guided tours.

The drive to the first dwelling, “Balcony House”, took 45 minutes from the visitor centre, along a twisty drive up onto the mesa.  The tour was about an hour and was the more challenging cliff dwelling to tour as you had to climb up 30ft wooden ladders and crawl through a 2ft square narrow tunnel.  The people from ancient times were a bit smaller than they are nowadays!

The second tour, “Cliff Palace”, is the largest of the cliff dwellings in the park.  This entailed climbing back up more wooden ladders through the   How the ancient people accessed their cliff dwellings is anyone’s guess.  Foot holds can be seen in some places going down the rock face.
narrow rocks.

 

The third tour was another 45 minute drive to the other side of the park.  The road took us along the top of the mesa that looked down on the town of Cortez where we were staying.  To the south west we could also make out Ship Rock in the distant desert. We passed some wild horses grazing.  They are discouraged in the park as they can destroy the artefacts.

 

We had time to quickly look around “Step House” before our next tour started.  This dwelling was a pit house and cliff dwelling side by side and we could wonder around on our own.

Our last tour was around “Long House”, the second biggest dwelling, and was the best of the tours.  We got to walk around a lot more of the site, including getting to the back by the cliff where water seeped out and where there were drain holes that would have collected the water in  ancient times.  We could see inside the Kivas and towers. 

 

All the dwellings we saw were quite amazing.  To think they were built around the same time as Salisbury Cathedral but had not intentionally been built to last, so we are lucky that they are still standing now.  There has been some restoration work but mainly to stabilise and enhance necessary safety issues.

 

The nearby “Canyons of the Ancients National Monument” also has several thousand dwellings but very few have been excavated so we decided not to visit there.