Mesa Verde
May 2018 | Park 6
We explored Mesa Verde with two couples who are close friends of ours during a shared weekend in Durango. It turned out to be an unconventional but nevertheless memorable park experience.
To set the scene: First, we stayed up far too late the night before making the drive to the park, discussing/arguing over how early we should leave in order to have the best chance of joining one of the coveted spots on a tour of the cliff dwellings. One couple wanted to be out the door by 6am, certain that the tours would sell out; another wanted to sleep in, feeling it wasn’t that big of a deal and the tours wouldn’t fill up that quickly. At the time, J & I landed somewhere in the middle. (We’ve since honed our skills and recognize that you always always always want to get to any national park early if you want a legitimate chance at a walk-up spot on a tour.)
We ended up leaving after 6am but before 8am, and once we made our way to the visitor center, the first couple was unfortunately proven right: Despite arriving before 9am, all the tours for the day were full. This put a bit of a damper on the morning as we huddled and reassessed our options. After consulting a map, we decided to drive to the trailhead closest to the Cliff Palace, the tour we’d hoped to be on that morning. Even if we couldn’t hike down to see the dwellings ourselves, we figured we could at least explore whatever areas around it were open to day hikers.
After parking our car, we saw a group of perhaps thirty or forty people gathered at near the trailhead. We casually approached and quickly realized that this was the exact tour we’d tried to go on but hadn’t received tickets for. I can’t remember who first pitched the idea of us slipping into the group of people and attempting to join the tour by osmosis, but my rule-following self resisted this immediately. I was overruled. Feeling tentative, I begrudgingly followed our group as we joined the cluster of folks on the tour.
As it turned out, neither of the park rangers checked for tickets, so we avoided being singled out as interlopers. Once we started down the trail on the descent toward the Cliff Palace, I relaxed a little and allowed myself to get swept away in the remarkable history of this place that the park rangers expertly conveyed at various stops along the way.
The cliff dwellings of the American Southwest are nothing short of mind blowing. They invite visitors to think critically about the long history of Turtle Island/the United States. No longer do I agree with sentiments I often hear after friends return from Europe — marveling over how many structures they saw that were hundreds or a thousand years old and remarking ruefully on how we (residents of the US) don’t have anything like it in our own country. But have you seen the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde? I want to respond (and sometimes do). Chaco Canyon? The mounds in Louisiana, Illinois, Oklahoma, Alabama, and more, some of which are estimated to have been built in 3500 BCE? There is deep history and ample evidence of complex societies that lived all over North America. The real thing to examine, I think, is why we deem some ancient structures and societies as more legitimate of memorialization than others.
I felt a sense of sacred respect while carefully walking through the preserved Cliff Palace. There is a faint red outline of a hand on the rock wall that I stared at for what felt like several minutes. I wondered who had placed their hand there. Had they coated it in some kind of dye or paint first? What had their life been like? Could they have ever imagined that somebody like me would be staring at that outline of their hand hundreds of years later? I felt a sensation of being both eerily close and eons away from the person who had placed their palm there. I felt similarly when gazing down at a nearby fire pit, thinking about the feet that had stood where mine were now planted, and while ducking beneath low-hanging door frames, curious about all the people who had passed through that doorway and had called this place home.
The ancient Pueblo people who lived in the Mesa Verde region for more than 700 years were eventually forced to leave the area due to a prolonged, severe drought roughly 800 years ago. Looking around, I tried to picture what that decision must have felt like: Families and communities needing to weigh out what to do when water became too scare to sustain life. I wondered what decisions we modern folk will need to make in our own lifetimes as a changing climate is also threatening our livelihoods, opportunities, and futures.
Our time in Mesa Verde was short and included the dubious decision of illicitly joining a tour, but by the end of the day we were all incredibly grateful we’d had the opportunity to visit such an ancient and impactful place. Many thanks to the (at least) 26 Tribes who are associated with the region around Mesa Verde. You can learn their names here. The Crow Canyon Archaeological Center has also published a history of the Peoples of the Mesa Verde Region that was illuminating to me.
Pictured below:
The view from Park Point, located on the drive into the park.
Cliff Palace, the largest known cliff dwelling in North America.
Male collared lizard and wild (feral) horses on Soda Canyon Overlook South Trail.
