Mesa Verde National Park
We didn’t initially plan on visiting any of the parks in Colorado at this time, but Mesa Verde was on the way-ish to the parks in Utah. This is another park that you can see most of in one day.
The big draw is the cliff dwellings of the Pueblo people, who abandoned Mesa Verde and most of the Four Corners region around 1300 for unknown reasons. Now, Molly and I could not give a shit about most historical sites. All the battlefields and historic monuments in the Eastern half of the country: skipped ‘em. Most early American history boils down to “Europeans Move Into Area, Make Things Worse”. It’s a bit repetitive.
However, we were surprisingly enthralled by the history of Mesa Verde and the Four Corners. The Pueblo’s were early agrarian people who figured out how to farm the elevation band between desert and mountain, and transitioned from pit houses to adobe huts to cliff dwellings during the span of a few hundred years. Very interesting to see a society in the US develop outside of European influence. And then they just kinda dispersed.
Fun fact: Mesa Verde is not actually a mesa, it’s a cuesta. From our travels, I’d say about half the things in this country are misnomered.
You enter the park from the north, which was still pretty snowy and overcast. A scenic drive takes you to the top of the cuesta, and then down to the cliff dwellings.
During the summer, you can take ranger-guided tours of some of the cliff dwellings, but it was cool enough just seeing them from afar. There were also spots on the drive to stop and see preserved pit houses, which honestly looked pretty cozy.
For the rest of our visit to Utah, anytime we saw a rock shelf with a big overhang, we’d say, “Looks like a nice place for a house”.
