Posts Tagged With: Mesa Verde National Park

Cortez, CO June 4, 2021

Tomorrow we will tour Mesa Verde National Park. Due to Covid, tours have been re-structured and limited. Tickets are required and limited. Very limited. Ticketing opens up two weeks before the date you wish to take a tour. Long House and Cliff Palace are the only two options for people like us who do not want to hike in the back country. Our itinerary only allowed Saturday June 5 as an option. Trying for a tour on today, Friday June 4, would have been risky given the travel time and route to get here.

Saturday May 22nd was the first day possible to order tour tickets. Having reviewed the ticketing portal in advance, it seemed that every day sold out the first day ticketing opened up. At 9 AM on Saturday, May 22, when the ticketing portal opened for the day, I tried for the first tour at 9:30 AM. Sold Out. Retried for 10:30 AM. Success!!. Out of curiosity, after I had completed my purchase, I tried to buy tickets for later in the day. The entire day was sold out. Good thing I did not dawdle or sleep in!

Recognize that a visitor can still walk around and take hikes. There is one other cliff dwelling where a visitor does not need tickets but since we came this far, lets get the full experience. Tomorrow’s post will detail the experience. I just wanted to provide a little background and warning for others who might wish to take a tour.

Today’s drive from Alamosa to Cortez was on a US highway. Sometimes it was two lanes, sometimes four. The route includes high mountain valleys, some rushing creeks, forests, rocky mountainsides, and tall mountains. The highest elevation was 10,856 feet above sea level. At Chimney Rock, more later, traffic stopped for construction. We pulled out from a side road and got into traffic behind a semi. I figured we would be stuck behind him for miles. Instead, we worked to keep up with him for over an hour. He led us along the highway no matter how steep the road became. Finally turned onto a different road. Forty years ago as we drove the Pennsylvania Turnpike, whose mountains were nowhere near as high, a car would zip past semis as they labored up hills. Then the semi would reverse the process and zip past the car on the downslope. Today’s trucks are much better engineered and manufactured.

Mesa Verde National Park was created as a national park in 1906 to preserve the archeological heritage of the Ancestral Pueblo people both atop the mesas and in the cliff dwelling below. The park includes over 4,500 archaeological sites, only 600 are cliff dwellings. (NPS brochure) This area of Colorado, and parts of the neighboring states of New Mexico, Utah and Arizona are rich in Native American history. It is said that 24 tribes trace their heritage back to this four corners area.

In the afternoon we explored the visitor center for Canyons of the Ancients. This is a national monument also, one administered by the Bureau of Land Management. The U.S. has 129 national monuments with the overwhelming majority administered by the National Park Service. BLM has 29 and the Forest Service is next with 13. The NPS managed monuments seem to get the most attention and visitors. We have visited several BLM National Monuments before, such as Pompey’s Pillar, Rio Grande del Norte, Kasha Katuwe Tent Rocks, and Grand Staircase Escalante among others.

Canyons of the Ancients National Monument is more than three times larger than Mesa Verde National Park. The national monument has thousands of archaeological sites. This high desert area or Great Sage Plains has fertile land and was home to single family farms, villages, kivas, cliff dwellings, reservoirs, etc that supported a densely populated area from AD 500 to 1300. However the national monument only receives 30,000 visitor per year compared to over 500,000 for Mesa Verde. The visitor center is the official repository of items found within the national monument, some of which came from archaeological digs at development sites, such as housing or irrigation projects. The displays are impressive and well laid out. And in these days of COVID-19, it was open.

The McPhee Reservoir dams the Dolores River to provide irrigation water for much of southwest Colorado. It is the fifth largest reservoir in the state and its canal system is extensive. The drought here has brought the reservoir levels extremely low and irriagation water is in short supply.

One of the excavated sites at Canyons of the Ancients is Lowry Pueblo. To get there we drove past some of those irrigation canals and observed the dramatic impact the water has. Irrigated farms have crops that are bright green and newly plowed fields are a deep brown waiting for the magic of water and seed to begin growing. It is a modern example of the impact of water and how the Ancestral Puebloans skillfully managed this scarce resource.

Lowry Pueblo is unusual within Canyons of the Ancients. The Great House and Kiva have been excavated and made available for viewing. Most of the national monument though is undeveloped, to respect and protect the items and the heritage of the Ancestral Puebloans. Between the Pueblo and the irrigated fields, Chris and I realized that life has been going on in this corner of the state for untold years and we rarely understand or respect that.

Chimney Rock. Chimney Rock National Monument was a spur of the moment action. We were not aware of this site in our planning. It is managed by the U.S. Forest Service. It too is connected to the Ancestral Puebloan culture and is considered the most remote and isolated community connected to Chaco Canyon. We were on the road west of Pagosa Springs and saw the sign. We were entering into a construction zone and were not sure we could even make the turn off. A car in front of us turned onto the road leading to Chimney Rock so we turned also.

The monument visitor center (Temporary quarters-the new one is currently under construction.) is just ten minutes off the main road. Reaching the rock pinnacle and touring the pueblo area would have required a commitment of two to three hours. We did not believe our schedule allowed it so we noted it for a future trip and headed back to the highway where we picked up the trail of the semi.

Ed Heimel, Chris Klejbuk Cortez CO June 5, 2021