Back to Colorado again ... temps warming up (somewhat) ... after a long drive crossing the bridge at the Dirty Devil River (named by John Wesley Powell and the contrast to the Bright Angel Creek that he named in the Grand Canyon) and then the bridge at the Colorado River, we wound our way to Mesa Verde National Park, between Cortez and Mancos, Colorado.
A view of the (snow covered) San Juan Mountains from the Mesa Verde Visitor's Center ...
Alas, no video at the Visitor's Center ... one must go to the museum at the end of Chapin Mesa to view the video ... which, of course, we did at the end of our first full day of exploring the park ... captures the cultural significance of the park preservation.
We did take a tour of the Cliff Palace cliff dwelling with Ranger Tom Wolf ... we had done the tour before (a couple of decades ago), but Ranger Wolf brought the community to life ... really a fantastic tour rich with details and passionate presentation ... the National Park Service has some amazingly knowledgeable and talented rangers ...
The landscape was a bit disorienting from our previous (two plus decades ago) visit due to the rampage of pine park beetle destroying the life of the forest, then major fires sweeping through the dead and dying landscape (latest major fires were in 1996, 2000 and 2006) ...
We toured Mesa Top Loop journeying through the history of the ancestral Puebloan culture ... from the early Basketweaver culture around 550 AD with pithouses on the mesa tops, to the "pueblos" built of sandstone on the mesa tops from around 750 AD to 1000 AD, to the Classic Pueblo Period where the sandstone structures became apartment building structures to the period from 1190 to the late 1270s when, for whatever reason, they built the massive cliff dwelling structures under the mesa tops and left their fields on the mesa tops, but lived in cliff dwellings under the mesa tops and carried water up from the river below. In less than two generations, by1300 AD, the entire area was deserted and all of the cliff dwellings abandoned as the Puebloan peoples migrated south into New Mexico and Arizona. Some mysteries yet to be answered ...
Square Tower House ...
Early pit house foundation ....
Sun Temple corridor ... one of the last structures built before departing the area ... never inhabited, never used ...
Mysteries remain ...
1 comment:
Mesa Verde is such a wonderful experience. With the fires burning in San Diego as I write, the new burned landscape at Mesa Verde is sobering. Is this the new West with global warming?
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