Parks and Rec Trek - Ancient Pueblo Ruins

MESA VERDE NATIONAL PARK
The cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde are spectacular, and we were lucky enough to have several days to enjoy them. While there are over 1200 ruins found, around 600 are dwellings (the others being storage facilities), and only a small handful can be visited. Most require a ranger-led tour, and we got tickets to all four of them - Long House, Balcony House, Cliff Palace, and Mug House. Cliff dwellings are primarily made up of sandstone, mortar, and wooden beams. The sandstone blocks were shaped by chipping at them with harder granite collected from river beds. Mortar was made with soil, water, and ash, and smaller stones were fitted into the gaps in the mortar to add stability to the walls.

Pithouses at Step House

On Friday, we got to the Long House lot early, so we quickly visited the Step House - the only self-guided tour. it's the smallest of the cliff dwellings, and has several reconstructed pit houses along with pueblos. It was interesting because there are two distinct occupations at the site - pithouses remain from a Modified Basketmaker site, dating to AD 626, and the remaining masonry pueblos are built on top of it from AD 1226.

Checkdam

We then visited Long House, the second largest dwelling in the park. Along the way, we saw the checkdams that the ancient Puebloans had built to help capture water and soil. Because they were practicing dry farming (where they relied solely on precipitation to water their crops), they needed to keep as much water in the soil as they could. Mesa Verde isn't a real 'mesa' - an elevated piece of land with a flat top - it's actually a cuesta - meaning it has a slight slope. This slope meant that water would reliably run down a specific direction, and the Puebloans could then build these checkdams in the right places to slow the water and allow it to seep deeper into the soil. Checkdams also allowed them to capture the rich runoff, giving them more fertile soil for their crops.

Hand and toe holds on the rock face

We also saw steep cliffs that had hand- and toe-holds carved into the rockface. You can only imagine how difficult it would be to navigate these cliffs while carrying baskets of water or heavy rocks.

Collecting water from a seep spring

Why did the ancestral Puebloans decide to move off the tops of the mesa and down into the cliff alcoves? The Mesa Verde area is a desert, and water is very scarce. Most likely the people were following the water. When the area was formed, it was under multiple iterations of inland seas. Layers of silt - sandstone - and organic matter - shale - built up over time. The sandstone soaks up rainwater, stopping only when it reaches a shale layer.  Years of continual freezing and defrosting weakens the sandstone until it finally erodes away against the shale layer, forming the alcoves. Also at these alcoves are seep springs, where water leeches out of the sandstone layer and can be collected in carved basins on the shale layer. This is the main source of water for the cliff dwellers.

Up the access ladder to Long House

The path to Petroglyph Pt

Squeezing through the path!

Immediately after our Long House tour, we drove to the Archaeological Museum to meet with Ranger Jill. She had prepared quite a bit of material for us, and spent almost 2 hours talking to us about her thoughts and experiences at Mesa Verde. Our final hike of the day was to Petroglyph Point - a really fun trail down the canyon to view petroglyphs, then back up to the rim to complete the loop. It was a great way to end the day!

Petroglyph Point

The balcony of Balcony House

The next morning, we left early (6:15AM) in order to get into the park for our Balcony House tour. Balcony House, a medium-sized dwelling, was constructed and occupied in the 13th century and named for the two small balconies that can be seen extending from two of existing rock walls. This was by far the most fun tour, with several tunnels, tight passageways, and ladders.

Tight squeeze!

Balcony House Obstacle Course

Example of chinking

How were the building in Mesa Verde made? The three main materials for all cliff dwellings were sandstone, mortar, and wooden beams. The sandstone was shaped into blocks using harder stones that had been gathered from riverbeds (far away) and brought to the sites. The mortar was a mixture of clay, water, and ash. By adding smaller stones into gaps in the mortar (called 'chinking'), walls could be made more stable. Over the walls were usually earthen plaster that could then be painted (but many of the plaster walls have since eroded away).




Immediately after the Balcony House tour, we had a Cliff Palace tour. This is the largest of the cliff dwellings in Mesa Verde (and in North America), with 150 room and 23 kivas for a population of around 100 people. (In contrast, most dwellings in the Park have between 1-5 rooms each, and many are single room storage units.)

Cliff Palace

We then visited the Mesa Top Drive sites to see examples of pithouses and early pueblo villages (from AD 600-900). From the drive we also had an excellent overlook at Sun Point View, which shows a dozen cliff dwellings in alcoves in two different canyons, including Cliff Palace.

How many cliff dwellings can you spot?

Sun Temple

The final stop of the day was to Sun Temple, a strange structure built with thick double walls and seemed to be unfinished. It was built in AD1250, and it is thought that it was perhaps built specifically for worship, and as a sacrifice to the gods since they were running out of natural resources and were in the midst of a prolonged drought.

On our final day, we took the Mug House tour - a backcountry hike to one of the lesser-visited cliff dwellings. It was a small group of only 10 visitors, and the trail was more scrambling over boulders and dodging rare endemic plants. Along the way, we passed by two other alcoves - one of which had a good example of a pictogram, a long zigzag that was compared to the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl. To me, it looked more like a mountain range... but I guess that's why I'm not an archaeologist...

Mug House

Mug House itself was named for the multiple mugs found there, and it's known for having some different architecture than some of the other cliff dwellings. Notably, there is an excellent example of a classic Mesa Verde Keyhole kiva, but there is also a kiva with 4 alcoves, and another with 8 alcoves. It's also one of the few alcoves that doesn't have an active seep spring - instead, nearby is a cistern that holds around 500 gallons.



CANYONS OF THE ANCIENTS NATIONAL MONUMENT

In the Lowry Pueblo kiva

We headed out of Colorado via Canyons of the Ancients - an unexpected detour that brought us to two pueblo ruin sites. The first was Lowry Kiva, a 40-ish room pueblo built in 1060AD. The best part was being able to go down into the large kiva, being able to see it from ground level rather than from above like every other kiva.

Figure built on the floor of the Great Kiva

The other structure on the site was the Great Kiva, a strange building with two huge stone figures built into the ground. Supposedly they represent summer and winter, though I thought they looked more like animals.





The next stop, which we did as a bit of an afterthought, was to Painted Hand Pueblo. This was an unexpected find down a bumpy dirt road, with a 13th century tower perched on a rock overlooking the canyon. Underneath was a small alcove, with several pictograph handprints painted on the back of the rock wall.

The eponymous Painted Hands

HOVENWEEP NATIONAL MONUMENT
The final stop of the day was to Hovenweep, where we walked the Square Tower Loop. This cluster of ruins was the largest group of Hovenweep's groups, housing up to 500 people between 1200 - 1300CE. We walked around Little Ruin Canyon, stopping to see the many structures that were perched on the canyon rim, tucked into alcoves, or built on and around boulders.

A checkdam at the head of Little Ruin Canyon
provided water to the community