Day 15: Sunday May 17th, Mesa Verde

Mesa Verde:

First of all, unrelated to Mesa Verde, but necessary for any pictures to have happened, Check out this cool feature the truck has. A 120V inverter! You can plug anything into it that you would normally plug into a regular outlet, like your phone, computer or in this case, the camera battery! I had forgotten to charge the camera battery the night before, and not only that, you saw how many stops we made the previous day (Garden of the Gods,  Four Corners and Great Sand Dunes) so the battery that was in the camera only had a little bit of charge left. If we hadn't had this feature, we would have been sad puppies with no pictures. 

There is no real way to describe what it was like at Mesa Verde, but here it goes. 

Cliff Palace

Cliff Palace

Mesa Verde has been a stop I have wanted to make for years. The idea that people lived not just on cliffs, but IN the face of the cliffs just amazes me. It still does. More so now that I have seen it up close.  

Cliff Palace

The Cliff dwellers were actually living on the top of the land first and only moved inside the cliffs afterward. Speculation is that there was no more room above ground and people had to move to the inside of the cliffs. I have my doubts on that, you should see how much land there is, but who am I, certainly not an historian or archeologist. But I will say, they have not found any evidence to support any kind of warfare, so they don't think it was that. 

One thing that is consistent with above ground pit houses and cliff houses is the style of how they built. You'll see the same high threashold wall/entry, rectangular doors that are only window sized, and Kiva's; the big round circular rooms with a fire pit. All dwellings have them, and all Kiva's have the back door behind the fire circle. This is not the draft as that is located further away. This cut out, positioned behind the small barrier, is for the spirit to enter and exit from the spirit world. 

Our guide, Bennett Bear

With our guide, Bennett Bear, we were able to climb around in one of the actual cliff dwellings, Balcony House. This required lots of squeezing into tight areas,

Threshold doorways 

crawling on hands and knees, climbing up wooden ladders,

Why tunnels instead of doors?

 And Climbing on steps carved into the side of the cliff. Just like they would have done, except they wouldn't have had hand rails! They would have climbed up and down the side of this cliff two or three times a day, minimum. Whew. No wonder their entrances and doorways were so tiny,  they would have been very lean folks!





This is an area where they would have ground grain.

This is looking back across the canyon at Balcony House.

Some of the beautiful terrain we hiked around in that day.

At the end of the day, we made a fire and sat outside our R-pod enjoying the night sky, the fire, the incredible day, and drinking wine from the very stylish, yet non glass wine glasses John lent us, (thanks John Sasinowski, you can't see the wine glasses, but they are there)