[Mesa Verde National Park, Sep 5, 2023]

People love to hate Gateway Arch National Park because it’s a man-made structure. But they forget several other parks preserve man-made structures, such as Dry Tortugas and Mesa Verde.

For over 700 years, the Ancestral Pueblo people built thriving communities on the mesas and in the cliffs of Mesa Verde. The park protects what they built, including several spectacular cliff dwellings that are open to the public via guided tours. Mesa Verde is a World Heritage Site and International Dark Sky Park.

The Ancestral Puebloans were an ancient Native American culture that spanned the present-day Four Corners region of the United States, comprising southeastern Utah, northeastern Arizona, northwestern New Mexico, and southwestern Colorado. They lived in a range of structures that included small family pit houses, larger structures to house clans, grand pueblos, and cliff-sited dwellings for defense. The kiva, a congregational space that was used mostly for ceremonies, was an integral part of the community structure. Three UNESCO World Heritage Sites located in the United States are credited to the Pueblos: Mesa Verde National Park, Chaco Culture National Historical Park and Taos Pueblo, which I visited in 2018.

It is not quite clear why the Ancestral Puebloans started building dwellings below the mesa top, in the cliffs. One theory is that drought sent them there in search for water sources that would seep through the porous rock and form pools in the alcoves. Several cliff dwellings are open to the public via guided tours, which have to be reserved in advance at Recreationg.gov. They typically run from mid-May to mid-October. Some tours multiple times a day every day, while others run just once a day on specific days of the week. Also, some cliff dwellings may close for restoration/stabilization work.

For our first full day in Mesa Verde, I had reserved two cliff dwelling tours – Balcony House in the morning and Cliff Palace in the afternoon.

Balcony House was a mid-sized village of 38 rooms and two kivas. It probably housed up to 30 people. Two naturally-occurring seep springs were located nearby. Its alcove faces northeast, which means the homes inside received little warmth from the sun during the winter months. Evidence of how room and passageway construction in the alcove evolved through time can easily be seen in Balcony House. Today, the tunnel, passageways, and modern 32-foot entrance ladder are what make it the most adventurous cliff dwelling tour in the park.

To make the cliff dwelling accessible to visitors, the National Park Service built some stairs to go below the cliff and added the ladder to climb into the dwelling. Ancestral Puebloans did not have ladders and would descend directly into the dwelling via foot and hand holds in the cliffs.

The ladder took us into the main alcove, the namesake for this cliff dwelling. When Balcony House was first discovered in 1884, the alcove was badly damaged and it needed stabilization.

From the alcove, we took a narrow passageway to go into the kiva room.

Then it was time to go through the tunnel. It looks narrow from the entrance but once you’re in the tunnel, it opens up.

Another steep NPS-built ladder and we were done. This tour took about an hour.

We had lunch at Spruce Tree Cafe on park grounds, then decided to do one of the short and easy trails before our 2 pm dwelling tour. The Petroglyph Point Trail offers excellent views of Spruce and Navajo Canyons, including Spruce Tree House (not open for tours). It takes you past a large petroglyph panel located 1.4 miles (2.3 km) south of the trailhead.

The trail follows a foot-worn trail of the Ancestral Pueblo people into the forested Spruce Canyon landscape. At one time, this path connected the community at Spruce Tree House with other outlying sites within the canyon and the rest of the Pueblo world. The first half of the trail up to the petroglyph panel is below the rim with numerous stairs, alcoves and tight spaces. It reminded me of a mini Fiery Furnace.

The large petroglyph panel represents the written language of the people who inhabited and traveled through this canyon. More than thirty human and animal figures, spirals, and handprints cover an area of over 35 feet wide.

After the panel, we scrambled up a large stone staircase back up to the mesa top. The return was easy and flat, unlike the path below the rim.

In the afternoon, we toured Cliff Palace, one of the largest dwelling in the park. It contained 150 rooms and 23 kivas and housed a population of approximately 100 people. There were no ladders involved this time, but this tour was bigger than the morning one. Seeing this giant cliff dwelling was a special treat, indeed.

In the evening, we had dinner at Metate Room restaurant in the lodge. We watched the sunset while some wild horses munched on grass outside.