The Four Corners: Mesa Verde National Park

A Cultural Jewel of North America and UNESCO World Heritage Site

The following piece was published at “Old Ones Dream” May 20, 2014, and as a piece in “Magnolia Elegy: Place In the Edisto Fork” April 14, 2022.

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Mesa Verde National Park is one of the best preserved of the populated areas that were part of the large Ancestral Puebloan community known as Chaco, a civilization with trading partners from the Pacific Ocean to the Mississippi River and south to Mesoamerica.

Driving Time Required

In the West, the good places take some work. We first learned this in September of 1981 when we camped across the northern route in Canada from Thunder Bay to Kapuskasing. Our chosen campsite at Thunder Bay, Ontario, was out on the Sibley Peninsula in Lake Superior in Sleeping Giant Provincial Park. We drove over 20 miles to the campsite after we turned on to the gravel road. It was on that trip that our family vocabulary expanded to include words such as “Nipigon” and “Labatt Blue”.

So on this Four Corners trip in 2014 our driving time was similiarly increased. The visitors center for The Island in the Sky District of Canyonlands NP is 25 miles from the highway, and the Needles District visitors center of Canyonlands is 35 miles off of US 191.

The entrance and visitor’s center for Mesa Verde NP is about 10 miles east of Cortez, Colorado on US 160. After the entrance you can see the top of the “Green Mesa” rising 1600 feet above you. The 21 mile winding drive up to the top and on to the Spruce Tree House ruins, Archeological Museum, Cafe, and Bookstore affords you some of the most beautiful long distance views in North America.

Discovering Spruce Tree House

We arrived at Spruce Tree House at about noon on April 7, 2014 and took the hike down to the cliff side site. Mesa Verde is very well preserved because the villages are built in high dry cliff alcoves and very well protected from the weather. The National Park Service brochure states that Spruce Tree House is “the park’s best preserved cliff dwelling”. The site is open daily from March 8 for self guided tours and was the only site that had opened yet on the day we visited. Other sites would open as weather and snow and ice melt permitted until all sites would be opened on May 22 until November 1.

            Our first glimpse of Spruce Tree House tucked up under the lip of the top of the Mesa. - Photo by Tom T Traywick

            Spruce Tree House - Photo by Tom T Traywick

            Spruce Tree House - Photo by Tom T Traywick

            Spruce Tree House - Photo by Tom T Traywick

             Spruce Tree House - Photo by Tom T Traywick

            Spruce Tree House - Photo by Tom T Traywick

             Spruce Tree House - Photo by Tom T Traywick

The Ancestral Puebloans of Mesa Verde

... long before Europeans explored North America, ... Ancestral Puebloans made Mesa Verde their home from about A.D. 550 to 1300. For more than 700 years they and their descendants lived and flourished here, eventually building elaborate stone communities in the sheltered alcoves of the canyon walls. Then, in the late A.D. 1200s, in the span of a generation or two, they left their homes and moved away. Mesa Verde National Park preserves a spectacular reminder of this ancient culture. The park contains over 4,000 known archeological sites including cliff dwellings and the mesa top sites of pit houses, pueblos, masonry towers, and farming structures. (U. S. National Park Service)

In the Home of the Ancients

Human history of the Ancient Ones, the Anasazi, the Old Ones, the Ancestral Puebloan People of the first millennia AD, seems to exude from the stones of these sites. Since this was a “Spring Break” week, there were school children present but they were not their normal exuberant selves, but noticeably subdued and reverent. The European visitors were particularly studious of the artifacts in the museum. If you love history, you will be moved by a sense of the wisdom and valor of the ancients, in this their home.