Don't Call Me Ishmael: Mesa Verde: Sturdy works from vanished builders

Spruce House

When the road sign said “Shiprock 56 miles) I realized me how remote these lands were. Shiprock was close to almost nothing. I once spotted Shiprock from a plan, the volcanic tower rising 1,700 feet above the Navajo reservation in northwest New Mexico.

This day’s destination stood a little closer. It would bring us to a place every bit as awe-striking as that volcanic rock. Mancos came up quickly. On the next southwestern swing, it might serve for lodging, since the small town has numerous hotels plus a brewery and cidery.

As we drove along, I was not thinking about Mancos, but the giant slab of land looming to the west. At first neither of us were sure that Mesa Verde could be so imposing on this majestic landscape. But the highway signs didn’t lie. The looming mesa was indeed Mesa Verde National Park, rising high above the dimpled lands of the Four Corners region broken by mountains and mesas.

The view from below

Immediately after the ranger station, where I read off the number on my annual pass and received a map via a gripper, the road turned steep immediately. We climbed through several “no stopping” zones, waiting for anywhere to stop. The road wound into the heart of the mesa, giving views in every direction to the flat land 1,000 or more feet below.

The early overlooks revealed none of the park’s archeological gems but offered amazing angles of the surrounding landscape. A few miles into the park road, and a visitor could look down on the Mancos Valley and see clearly to the San Juan Mountains, not to mention mountains and mesas in all directions.

We took the short walk uphill to the park’s highest point (Park Point, of course) through a forest of Gambel oak no more than five feet tall. The skeletal trunks of dead oaks stood much higher, a sign that forest fire had scorched these climes. A fire tower stood on Park Point, drawing the attention of the morning’s few visitors as we moved onto the park’s archaeological sites. There would be no big crowds today, but we spent most of the day staying just ahead of the pack crawling up the park road.

Near Park Point

When we passed the park lodge and its large visitor center, the road finally flattened out. We reached the canyonlands where the crown jewels of Mesa Verde studded the canyonlands that spread out on its southern flank.

This dry region is always at risk for forest fires. Wetherill Mesa was closed due to fire risk, limiting where we could wander. But in a place as wondrous as Mesa Verde, there was plenty yet to see. In fact, barely a fraction of the park’s essential visits had passed.

Made a national park by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1906, Mesa Verde is still the largest archaeological preserve in the U.S. Driving along its canyons made me realize that the protected lands include cities that might have housed hundreds at one point. There are more city and village sites in Mesa Verde, many yet to beexcavated. Forest fires that burned away dense underbrush in the early 2000s newly revealed early 600 new sites and a wealth of irrigation features. As much as we see on the canyon walls, there’s an unbelievable number of sites barely explored.

The moment when first cliffside dwellings began to emerge from the canyon walls could be described as a religious experience. Stare and stare at the reddish rock. Suddenly the earthworks from a millennia earlier come into view. Houses and temples appear where we expect only solid canyon walls. Divots in the walls are footholds where the Ancestral Puebloans stood while building these august structures.

Ancestral Puebloan is the preferred term for these cultures, as the Navajo work for Mesa Verdeans, Anasazi, means “ancient enemies.” Today’s Puebloan cultures are not fond of the term.

Glimpse inside the Sun Temple

One must admire the ingenuity of those who settled Mesa Verde. Before we even look upon their architectural and town-building prowess, their pick of site deserves praise - invisible from below and difficult to approach. That the city ruins were ever found is a testament to how well they were hidden in the steep canyons that form atop the mesa. The Ute tribes knew of the ruins but never inhabited them, considering them sacred.

It’s hard not to see Mesa Verde’s lost cities as the original metropolis of the southwest (Pueblo Bonito at Chaco Canyon National Historical Park can make similar claims). People clustered in these dwellings for centuries, maybe less for the cliffside towns, but who could look across the canyons and not be amazed at what the Ancestral Puebloans accomplished? There were no paths open to the ruins due to pandemic, since ticketed, ranger-guided tours are required for entrance the Cliff Palace and most of the major dwellings.

Pithouses

Around the mesa tops lie archaeological sites that peel away Mesa Verde’s early settlements. The first settlers built pithouses along the mesa top, digging deep to provide cool places for families during the hot months and rooms for food storage. The Ancestral Puebloans who constructed many generations of houses also built a system of reservoirs atop the mesa. Far View Reservoir caught water from snowmelt as well as summer storms, which complemented the dry farming conducted over much of the mesa.

The park’s signature cliff dwellings seem to grow in prominence as the roads circle the mesa tops. Cliff Palace might be the park’s best-known feature, as well as the largest city built into the canyon wall. But that pulls away none of its majesty. The silent towers of this ancient city sit below the lip of the canyon and speak to people able to build cities advanced for the time. I would put most structures built at the apex of Mesa Verde up again the cities built in Medieval Europe. There are towers several stories tall, and many religious sites that we still don’t understand, such as the Sun Temple. You can peek into the Sun Temple through windows in the rock, butno one can enter. What you can know about the Sun Templeis it has similar dimensions to religious structures in Egypt and Greece. No one knows why, but it’s hard not to think about those possibilities.

We should not discount what the people who inhabited Mesa Verde have done. No one knows for sure why they abandoned this cliffside paradise – the prevailing theories center on depleted soils and a long period of dry years – but they left a magnificent legacy in the cliffsides.

We stopped at the venerable Spruce House further north. Well-preserved and situated in a canyon where trees towered above its structures, it’s the best-preserved cliff house in the park. There are many more structures in the parks beyond the mesa-top loops, as well as cliff villages that have not been excavated at Mesa Verde.

Eventually Mesa Verde demands its visitors descend. All that you have seen must stay hidden along Mesa Verde. Drivers must wind back down the mesa and pull back from all they have seen on Mesa Verde’s flat top.

At the bottom, Mesa Verde again impressed with its signature butte and its wide top. But if you’ve delved into the park, you’ll never lose sight of the homes, villages and cities that break from its canyon’s curving walls. Thousands of years earlier, people had the foresight to build cities in this mesa’s canyons. The civilizations might not have endured in Mesa Verde, but the impact of their city construction has stayed strong a millennium later.