Somehow Mesa Verde National Park had managed to elude me until now, probably because of its location at the Colorado corner of the Colorado Plateau, furthest away from the places I usually make efforts to visit. Prior to our Rio Chama river trip we decided to tack on a couple days exploring Mesa Verde to help justify the effort to drive here. I've long enjoyed the mystery, uniqueness, and sense of place conveyed by cliff dwellings and have sought them out, particularly some of the excellent find-and-explore-yourself ones around Comb Ridge, Cedar Mesa, and Natural Bridges. The cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde are some of the largest around with several complexes with more than a hundred rooms. I was interested to see these, even knowing the need for ranger-led tours, paved trails, and early 1900s reconstructions would detract from the experience.
After a stormy night in our campsite next to Jackson Gulch Reservoir near Mancos, we drove to the park entrance station. Notably my annual parks pass just expired and I disappointingly had to purchase a new 2026 pass with Trump's self-appointed scowling face under "America the Beautiful" text. It was a rude start to trying to celebrate visiting a new national park and as I write this I can still feel the gross weight of it glaring through my wallet. We followed the park entrance road as it climbed the crest of the cuesta and then meandered in and out along the heads of the southward draining valleys. The terrain was subdued here with no cliffs in sight other than the north escarpment down to Montezuma Valley and pretty sparse remnant pinyon-juniper forest. The parched terrain was further accentuated by the scars of many significant fires over the last several decades including most notably the 2000 Bircher Fire that burned 22,000 acres, 2002 Long Mesa Fire, and 2000 Pony Fire which each showed essentially no sign of recovery. Even more than a melting glacier, this park punctuates a dramatic changing climate: flowing springs and verdant gardens that once supported thousands of people in vibrant communities now replaced by barely moist seeps and forests of lifeless blackened trunks on the desolate mesatops.
First up was our 9am tour of Balcony House. Billed as the most adventurous tour, it involved climbing a steep 30 foot-high ladder to gain the dwelling and crawling along a dark, narrow passageway to exit. It was a mid-sized village of 38 rooms and two kivas. Although the ruins themselves are on a balcony halfway up a vertical cliff, the house got its name for well-preserved adobe ledges at the front of several of the two-story buildings that were used to travel between rooms. The extensive and somewhat crude reconstruction efforts detracted some from the sights but you could still get a small sense of what it must have been like to call this cliff-clinging village home by walking through the passageways and standing on the patio between the twin roofless kivas. We clung towards the back of the tour group which allowed me to get several views without our fellow tourists. I appreciated the unrushed pace of all the tours we went on in the park. We all agree that of the three tours we did this one felt the most intimate (like we were in it) as you could peer through small windows and have views reveal themselves at the end of dark hallways. Relatedly, I probably took more photos of this tour than the others. The kiva floors and walls were some of the best we saw (but again probably sharply reconstructed). I also enjoyed seeing the different generations of buildings and how they amalgamated to build the village. I never did get a complete explanation of how the inhabitants commuted to and from this most cliffy of cliff dwellings we visited.
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| A nice example of a balcony spanning multiple generations of construction |
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| An intimate window between the two main plazas at the site |
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| Detail of a kiva in the foreground |
With time before our 11:30a tour of Cliff Palace, we drove to the museum complex for a snack and a short walk to an overlook of Spruce Tree House, the third largest cliff dwelling in the park at 130 rooms and 8 kivas. In the past there was an opportunity to self-guide this ruin but the trail was closed so we had to be content viewing it across the canyon with binoculars. The most prominent feature was an impressive three-story wall containing a block of at least 8 rooms set behind a prominent kiva and plaza. A lush woodland in front of the ruins contrasted with the oranges of the cliffs and structures.
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| Spruce Tree House |
Next up was the Cliff Palace tour which started at its overlook. Of over 600 cliff dwellings in the park, Cliff Palace is the singular one that people associate with Mesa Verde. It is the largest cliff dwelling on North America with 150 rooms and 23 kivas (an oddly large number suggesting it was an important social and ceremonial site for not just the inhabitants but others in the region and on the contemporary mesatop villages). Less a palace and more of a sprawling metropolis, it really was noteworthy for its stairstepping levels and depth towards the dark back of the alcoves. My favorite features were how some of the towers were built into the boulders and outcrop on the floor and also the now-inaccessible storage ledge well up the overhang of the cliff that was not visible from the lookout above. The tour itself was less interactive than the previous, as we largely just walked the path along the front of the ruins with a short detour to gather around one of the kivas. There was a lot going on wherever you looked with layer after layer of structures (the frontispiece highlights this nicely).
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| Cliff Palace (and below) |
After Cliff Palace we drove the loop around Chapin Mesa checking out the roadside stops. The museum was a bust as the exhibits were closed for renovations. Towards the start we stopped at the overlook for Square Tower House, another famous and imposing structure masterfully built into the wall of the alcove. It was not until looking at my photos later that I noticed the stacked rocks on a sketchy sloping ledge ABOVE the tower- count me thoroughly impressed!
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| Square Tower House (and below) |
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| Notice the stacked rocks above and left of the tower! |
Like most visitors, I did not fully appreciate the extent, importance, and deeper history of the villages and pueblos on the mesatops above the cliffs. Along the driving loop were many stops to see some of these partially excavated, housed within structures to protect them from the elements. While these are much less to look at and appreciate compared to the cliff dwellings, the interpretive signs did a good job painting a more thorough picture of life on Mesa Verde 1500 to 700 years ago. At my favorite of these mesa sites was an example of three separate generations of kivas built overprinting each other with the oldest structure stratigraphically the lowest. The heavily reconstructed Sun Temple was another oddity with its combination of both rounded and squared walls. Partway through we stopped at the roadside stand to have some powdered sugar Navajo fry bread. Along some of the rim roads we could see the otherworldy spire of Shiprock erupting from the plateau a solid 45 miles to the southwest.
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| Three generations of overprinted kivas (left, right, then center) |
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| Sun Temple detail |
Just as thunderstorms descended on us we exited the park and caught up with my friend Jeff in Mancos. He gave us an impromptu tour of the Alpacka Raft factory which was actually really cool to see. We got to see the different machines and stations that transform the raw fabrics into hand-crafted works of modern form and function. After that we had appetizers in the local wine-and-book hangout, then a meal before returning to our campsite outside of town (dodging the many deer along the way). As continued throughout our trip, we had pleasantly cool monsoon-fueled sleeping temperatures.
The following day we stopped at the bakery in town and then drove the longer road out to Wetherill Mesa at the far side of the park for our Long House tour. We walked the trail through a charred skeleton of a forest to our meeting site then shortly began the tour.
Long House (150 rooms, 21 kivas) is nearly equal in size to the more famous Cliff Palace but actually probably housed considerably more people based on its layout. This too had a now-inaccessible upper storage level above the dwellings. I enjoyed this tour more than Cliff Palace as we got to climb and ladder to go up into the shadows at the back of the alcove and look out. Back here was the crucial life-sustaining spring. An intricate network of carved channels in the bedrock floor leading to perfect ladle-shaped depressions was one of the more unique features we saw and was really special. It was easy to imagine people crouched over to scoop water out of this delicate water source. The spring's modern flow is clearly much less than it used to be, another clear sign of shifting climates and a more verdant pas
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| Long House (and below) |
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| Carved pathways and cupules to channel drinking water from the spring |
After the tour we took the short hike down to Step House near the parking lot. Though the only self-guided cliff dwelling, it had much less interest to me apart from the reconstruction of a pit house.
With that we had a brief stop at the fancy new visitor center at the park entrance (the only infrastructure at the park not in a state of decay) and drove east with a pupusa stop in Durango and then a brief stop to check out the riverside hot springs in the center of Pagosa Springs before driving on to our campsite near our Rio Chama put-in.
Overall we had a nice day and a half in Mesa Verde, satisfied at seeing most of what is on offer for public viewing and a little deeper appreciation for life 700 years ago. I was certainly appreciative of the tours as it would be a much different experience if we were purely limited to distant overlooks. Thanks to Jeff for the catchup, apps, and factory tour.
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