Day Five - Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Usually I take a little notepad from the hotel to use to take notes during the day's travels so that I don't have to trust my memory to remember everything I want to blog about. Today I forgot the notepad, so I pulled out a receipt from car servicing from the glove compartment. Here are the notes on that paper: "Day Five - May 6 - Wed - San Juan National Forest." That's it. I guess I won't be able to write about the Mesa Verde Cliff Dwellings after all.

NOT.

Just about forty miles west of Durango off of US160 and on the south side of the San Juan National Forest is Mesa Verde National Park. And while I'm thinking about it, tax dollars spent on our national parks, monuments, historic sites, etc., are among the best ways we spend our tax dollars. Highways and transportation systems to get us to those locations are also among the best ways we spend our tax dollars. We always find the park rangers and personnel to be so knowledgeable and so committed to preservation and education about the components of the system that we constantly are satisfied and think that we should become advocates.

Mesa Verde National Park preserves the archaeological heritage of the Ancestral Puebloans at this site. The site consists of over 4,500 archaeological locations, including 600 cliff dwellings. It is a huge and inviting place and is worth much more time that we were able to commit to it out of our schedule (one day). We arrived in time to sign up for the noon one-hour Ranger-guided tour of the Cliff Palace - probably the best known and most recognized and photographed site in the park. We grabbed a pre-made sandwich at the Terrace Restaurant and proceeded to the starting point of the tour.

We already had traveled over twenty miles from US160 to get to the park's visitor center, and we had taken dozens of photos of the mountains and valleys that we could see from the pull-out parking areas overlooking the broad, green Mancos Valley and Montezuma Valley, along with Park Point and Geologic Overlooks. At each location the Park Service information kiosks directed our attention to various points of interest on the horizon.

Ranger David was an absolute delight. As we arrived he already was in great conversation about the fire damage that the park had sustained over the past few years. Three naturally occurring fires had cleared parts of the landscape of its 600-700 year old trees. These slow-growing tress will take centuries to return to their pre-fire status. The latest fire spared much of the forest around the Cliff Palace when the wind direction changed suddenly and the fire turned to land where it already had traveled and burned itself out.

David gave us all the disclaimers that are required by the park service regarding the nature of the tour that we were about to take and the fact that the service would help us if we were hurt in an accident, but that we would pay for it! Great sense of humor - that guy!

We started down the iron steps and then onto the rock lined path to the Cliff Palace. You'll have to look at Harold's photos to get the right feel for this path. The rock walls were over our heads on both sides and the stone steps were uneven - some tall in height and some short - according to the Ranger, the Ancestral Puebloans had no OSHA! Around a bend in the path and through the trees we caught our first glimpse of the Cliff Palace - and we caught our breath, too, both literally and figuratively. The site was breathtaking and brought a resounding response from each of us - "I can't believe I'm really here." We have seen pictures of these cliff dwellings so many times and wanted to visit them for so long, and we finally are here.

We gathered with the other tourists at an overhang in the cliff and on the steps going into the actual dwelling for part of the Ranger's presentation and questions and answers. The gist of the tale is that we know the facts about the cliff dwelling - when it was built, what materials were used, approximately how many people lived there for how long, etc. But we don't know why the dwelling was built or why it was abandoned. About 1,400 years ago (600AD) the Ancestral Puebloans living in the Four Corners area made the mesa their home. On the flat tops of the mesa above the cliffs, they farmed and hunted and lived. Eventually they moved into the cliff dwellings they built in the sheltered alcoves of the canyon walls below the mesa.

The dwellings are composed of sandstone bricks held into place by a mortar of dirt and water. The Rangers are trying to replicate the mortar in order to repair and support the structures as needed for preservation. The dwellings include multiple "apartments" with living and sleeping rooms, kitchens, storage rooms (probably those at the top of the dwelling complex) and round kivas and rectangular towers. The construction is straight and strong and uses limbs of available trees (pinon and juniper) for creating the roof and floor structures. The structures were painted with red and white paint (oops, maybe the Flying C Ranch was copying the ancients!), and evidence of this painting is provided in the interior of the tower at the Cliff Palace. It is likely that about 200 people lived in the Cliff Palace at any one time. When the Palace was originally excavated in the late 1800's/early 1900's (I think), over nearly 300 rooms were at this site. But in those days the excavation process included deconstructing to get to the bottom, so today there are only 100+ rooms at the site.

So why? We will never know. As we stood with the Ranger around one of the wide open kivas, we discussed the possibilities. Theories for establishing the cliff dwellings include the need for more space on the mesa for farming, the need for protection, the need for a convenient water source, the need for defense. We don't know. Theories for leaving the cliff dwelling include sickness (though no evidence other than ringworm appears for this theory), defeat by an enemy (again, no real evidence exists for this), depletion of farm land (this is a possibility), movement to other more desirable locations closer to the life source (The Grand Canyon). Obviously it is unlikely that we will ever know.

What we do know is that the descendants of these Ancestral Puebloans are the Native Americans who continue to live in the Four Corners area and beyond. The descendants return to the sacred areas for renewal and communion and tell the stories of their ancestors as they know them. The descendants have worked with the Park Service and the Congress to change the language we use to describe their ancestors. The various tribal nations have agreed to the term "Ancestral Puebloans" as the preferred description and that language is replacing "Anasazi" which means "the ancient foreigners" and came to mean "enemies." The agreed upon term is from the Spanish and seems to represent the positive and sacred meaning that the modern descendants prefer.

As the tour ended we climbed four to five stories out of the Cliff Palace and found ourselves needing to rest and reflect on the experience. It definitely will be one that we remember for many years as one of the most profound and intriguing experiences of our lives.

We returned to the Far View Visitor Center for a late lunch at the Terrace. We had Navajo Tacos - all the usual taco ingredients served on Indian fry bread - now that's a lunch. The other guests and many of the staff were from other countries - England, Japan, Scandinavia, Germany, and others. We remembered this phenomenon from our 2007 western trip when we met so many foreign tourists and so many international staff members in the parks. It is a great tribute to our country that we can attract tourists to our most valuable treasures and that we can invite so many international young people to work in those sites and to experience the hospitality of our nation, if only for a short time in their lives.

Our return to Durango included a short detour through Mancos CO, the home of our Park Ranger. It's a small town, off the beaten path, and probably will stay that way!

After cocktails we experienced another outstanding dinner at The Mahogany Grill, the restaurant associated with one of the old hotels in town. I feasted on elk steak and Harold feasted on a platter of quail, shrimp, and crab cake. It's a tough life but we might as well be the ones living it!