Mesa Verde National Park

Spruce house. You can see a kiva with a roof and a ladder in the left side of the picture. More about this later

Towards the end of our stay in Durango we took the opportunity to visit the Mesa Verde National Park which is about an hours drive. We were once again lucky enough to have the use of Jim's car which was much easier than taking the RV. We had a taste of the cliff dwellings of the Ancient Puebloans at Montezuma National Monument in Arizona but this was much more extensive.

In about 750AD the Puebloans were living on top of the Mesa (above ground) farming and hunting. In the late 12th century they started building and living in these cliff houses. Just over 100 years later they all moved on. No one is sure why but the most likely theory is a long drought. There is an amazing amount of ruins still left, there were dwellings built in 600 of the parks rock alcoves and it was fascinating to tour around them with the park rangers who as always were exceedingly knowledgeable.

This is a kiva. Each house we visited had a number of these. Houses ranged from big to small and could accommodate up to 100 people. The Kiva's were central to community, traditions and ceremonial life. They were a clever design with a fire pit in the bottom and a ventilation system including a reflector to stop the air coming in down the ventilation shaft disturbing the fire. There was a wooden and clay roof over them. This allowed for the bottom of the kiva to be used for story telling, keeping warm in the winter with a fire and cool in the summer months. The area over the roof was then used as a communal area for daily tasks (you can see the roof in the top photo of this post). Very efficient use of space.

They used lots of ladders to get up and down the cliffs and also down into the kivas. We visited the balcony house which had a narrow crawl space to enter it. It is thought that this was to make the area very easy to protect even by children or the elderly (frighteningly for Rob and Fiona the women lived to an average age of 30 and the men 35!).

The view from Balcony House

Balcony house was named for its large balcony with a wall providing protection from falling off. Fiona and Symi are standing in front of the wall and behind them is a 600 ft deep canyon. Other houses did not have such steep drop offs. Definitely scored highly in the view department. 

Doorways and shelves. Many  rooms were for storage

Balcony house was our favorite as it was well preserved and we were able to move around in it the most. They seemed to have the best masons as the walls were straight and the corners square. The holes are doors not windows - small for thermal efficiency.

Corn cob above

If you look carefully about 2/3 of the way down in the middle of this picture you can see a corn cob which is 700 to 800 years old. They are evidently found all over this area. No wonder we have to pick them up out of the chicken coop!

All in all an amazing day that stimulated our interest in the early inhabitants of early American which we are keen to investigate further. It was topped off by the weather which changed from cloudy in the morning to a snow storm on the way home. Rob once again drove us home safely over the 8800ft pass back to Durango - quite nice not to be in the RV though as it would have been a very slow trip.

Cliff Place