Red Rocks - Southwest trip, 2012
CLIFF HOUSES MESA VERDE, Colorado
The cliffhouses of Mesa Verde
| And now we have finally reached another of the highlights of this trip - the cliff houses of Mesa Verde. Shortly after the Red Rocks tour I went on a "study" tour of Turkey and visited the Cliffhouses of Ephesus The houses there, built during the late Roman period were much more elaborate than at Mesa Verde, but here the houses are literally hanging on the rocks like bird nests, whereas in Ephesus they were built into the slope of the hill, a somewhat less daunting construction feat. |  |
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| As can be seen clearly on the pictures here, no mountains were graded, no roads were cut into the hillside, Instead pueblos were built directly into and under the sheer rock. Just like in chaco Canyon, here also very large groupings (pueblos) were constructed with with extreme human effort and only the most minimal and primitive of tools. The houses generally are built out of sandstone that was quarried and worked with stonetools and reinforced with wooden (largely pine) timbers. | |||||
| Cliff palace 1881 - probably the first picture | The houses reached up to four stories in some places. On the one hand Mesa Verde was a pretty good place to build since there was sandstone and forests which at 8,000 + feet were abundant and easily reachable, compared to Chaco or Aztec or Slamon where all wood had to be carried at least 50 miles or more. When the cliff houses were constructed the residents did not yet have domesticated animals other than dogs and turkeys. Dogs were used to carry loads, but obviously would not have been able to haul logs. Added to that is the llittle problem that all materials had to carried up and down steep canyons and/or cliffs. A pretty amazing feat! During the early period of occupation at Mesa Verde between 800 and 1150, pueblos were built on to of the Mesa, just like in Canyon de Chelly or at Chaco Canyon. Only in Mesa Verde the cliff houses literally hang on the rocks. Back then people climbed up and down those rocks - and God knows how they did it in some of those places! - For the sissified visitors of today rudimentary steps have been cut into the rock where possible, but is is still pretty a challenging climb down |
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And this is how it looks today - decorated with tourists | ||
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| the rock wall to the Cliff Palace. Then, to get back up to the top of the mesa, one has to climb a ladder that has been attached to an essentially vertical rock face. Ok, there was a five year old (with mama and papa) who did it, so I figured we should be able to do it too and we did! Perhaps even more scary was the time we spent standing in the "palace" listening to the ranger explain the history and construction of the dwelling. On the middle picture on the right it is possible to make out a small group of people (the bluish dots) who are listening to the ranger. It is, however, not quite clear exactly how narrow the room of this platform is and how long and steep the slope down to the canyon. The ranger who spoke to us stood with her back to the edge, at most a foot away from the abyss. I do not suffer from vertigo, but that looked awfully scary to me. As mentioned already, we were there on the second day of the season and the number of visitors was relatively small. The cliff palace can only be visited in a ranger led group - for obvious safety reasons. In this early part of the season groups were pushed through in half hourly intervals. During high season it is every 15 minutes. Even the half hour tour was barely long enough to get down, listen to the ranger and climb back up. High season must be hell. Cliff Palace is the larges of the cliff pueblos in Mesa Verde, but not the only one. There are two other sites which can be visited - when we were there only one, the second one would not open for several more weeks. Both of these sites also require permits and climbing. But Nock had enough for the day and we sedately visited the museum instead. As discussed already on the previous page, there are many interesting archeological things to see in Mesa Verde. We spent two very pleasant and stimulating days up there, but in hindsight perhaps three days would have been even better. Perhaps some other time - for now our motto had to be "wagons ho - on to Utah" | |||||
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