Our Trip To The West – Day #4 – Mesa Verde Cliff Dwellings

We did a big loop on our trip out west by going out to Grand Junction and Colorado National Monument first, Our Trip To The West – Day #2 – Colorado National Monument then out to Utah and Arches National Park, Our Trip To The West – Day #3 – Arches National Park , and from there, south and back into Colorado again. This time our adventures took us to Mesa Verde National Park to see the cliff dwellings.

The cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde are some of the most notable and best preserved in North America. Sometime during the late 1190s, after primarily living on the mesa tops for 600 years, many Ancestral Pueblo people began moving into pueblos they built into natural cliff alcoves. The structures ranged in size from one-room granaries to villages of more than 150 rooms. While still farming the mesa tops, they lived in cliff dwellings, repairing, remodeling, and constructing new rooms for nearly a century. With more than 5,000 sites, including 600 cliff dwellings, Mesa Verde is the largest archaeological preserve in the United States. Cliff dwellings were built by the Ancestral Puebloans, who were ancestors of the Pueblo Native American tribe.

The cliff dwellings were built from 1200–75. The people had lived on flat ground around Mesa Verde. To keep their community safe, they started to build homes in the cliffs. In the mid-1200s, the population began migrating to the south, into present-day New Mexico and Arizona. By the end of the 1200s, most everyone had migrated away. Drought probably caused food shortages, especially because the population had grown so large. The resulting hardships may have led to tension and conflict. Eventually, the Pueblo people of the Mesa Verde region decided to migrate south, where the rains were more reliable.

We missed our window of opportunity to purchase tickets to go inside the actual cliff dwellings, but we still got a chance to see how life was lived in and around them. We still got to see all of the dwellings and the pit houses and pueblos too. Fortunately the Visitor’s Center offered very good representations of what life was like.

These are representations from the Visitor’s Center. Life was hard, but the people seemed content. A hard life was all they knew.

We were able to hike all around and there was still so much to see and so much history to take in.

Boys will be boys.

The girls were all looking pretty.

After exploring the area on foot, we took in a couple of short documentary films that went into even more details about what life was like for the Puebloans. We got to see what they ate and what tools they used and learned a lot more about the culture of the cliff dwellers. All of it was very interesting.

All this corn was stored in the pot for 1000’s of years. Corn was a main staple of the Pubeloan diet.

I have always loved and been so intrigued by history, of all kinds. I have never been able to grasp or understand it when people say they have no interest in history. History is our past and by learning about out past, we are allowed to progress and move forward. Without knowing about our history, we can have no future.

We all thoroughly enjoyed this fascinating trip to the past. If you haven’t already been to Mesa Verde, I highly recommend it. It’s fun to step back in time. Upon leaving Mesa Verde and the Cortez area, we were back in the car, headed north to Alamosa for more adventures yet to come.

Learn from the past to build for the future. Stay safe and stay well. ‘Til next time.