Tuesday, June 15, 2010
Mesa Verde, day one
We tooled into Mesa Verde National Park (trudging through the requisite road construction) and checked out the visitor's center. The typical Mesa Verde visitor purchases tickets for tours of one or more of the three main attractions: Cliff Palace, Balcony House, and Long House. We purchased two tickets for today (Balcony House and Cliff Palace) and will do Long House tomorrow. Except that after the first tour, we almost just skipped the second two tours. The main drawback was a lack-luster tour guide (the nicest way I can put that) and the large crowd on the tour - both of which made us just want to just go hiking on our own. But the only way to see some of these places is to take the tour.
One of the odd things to me is that the National Park service doesn't seem to enforce age limits for the strenuous tours. If you tell them that your two year old can make it up that 32 foot ladder without your help, you're good to go. If you cannot walk up the stairs to the second floor of a building and are wearing flip-flops, they will let you do the tour if you tell them you think you can. The Balcony House involved not only a very tall ladder as well as 18 inch passage way you navigate on your hands and knees (ouch!). I'm not afraid of heights, but even I was a little shaky at the top of that ladder. I climbed next to a woman in distinctly non-hiking footwear who literally shook all the way up that ladder. But we all made it (even the family with the two and three year olds), and the ruins at the top were worth the climb.
After the Balcony house tour, we did the Mesa Top loop, which mostly included driving, with short turn-offs or hikes to view archeological sites of earlier puebloan settlements. My favorites were the cross-canyon views of mesa pueblos. Gorgeous.
On our trip across country, we've been reading In Search of the Old Ones by David Roberts. It's provided a wealth of information on the known history of the Puebloans as well as those who rediscovered and excavated their sites.We've also gotten invaluable information from Rick Shafer, author of a great blog on the Anasazi of Southwestern Utah (do not read this blog unless you are ready to pack up for your trip to this area). I'm so glad we didn't come in 'cold' to tour this part of the country. There are still many questions about where the Puebloans came from, why they chose to live under the mesas, and where they disappeared to after 1300 AD.
This picture was taken from the balcony staging area where we met for our tour. Our tour guide this time was a retired college professor with a master's degree in Southwest Archaeology. How perfect is that? For some reason the people on this tour were also more into it - very engaged in the tour. We knew going in that a good percentage of Cliff Palace had been reinforced in modern times, so we weren't surprised by the metal supports you see here and there. In spite of that, Cliff Palace is amazing. The ruins extend at least 100 feet back in to the cliff, and the more protected rooms still show original plastering and decoration.
In this village of 100+ rooms, many rooms and just about every nook and cranny were devoted to storage. How much food would it take to feed your family and 75 of your closest friends for six months of bitter winter? I think it is clear that just as I would not have made it as a pioneer, I also would not have made it as a puebloan. I like large, walk in closets and have way more square footage to live in than I need. I can't plan grocery shopping that will last a whole week, so I know if I was in charge of stockpiling food for my family for a winter, we'd all have been dead without restaurants nearby.
So in the end we enjoyed Mesa Verde today - it was a great introduction to the desert portion of our trip. But we are itching to get out of the crowds to the quiet. One of the best moments today was hiking out to an overlook and hearing the wind whistling through the juniper trees and being buzzed by swallows who nest in the cliffs.
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