Mesa Verde National Park

We spent Saturday and Sunday in Mesa Verde National Park, in the southwest corner of Colorado near the Ute Mountain Reservation. Mesa Verde is a fascinating park, in part because it was created to protect a cultural resource and not a natural one per se. It was created in 1906 to protect the cliff dwellings of the Ancestral Pueblo people. The parks founding is an interesting story in and of itself – but it is most remarkable because “discovery” of the site contributed to creation of the Antiquities Act of 1906 which had a profound impact on conservation in the expanding United States. In a nutshell here are the basics (I know I am geeking out…bear with me!):

• After MV was “discovered” (I keep putting that in quotes because of course the Native peoples knew these sites existed) a Swede visited the site and excavated a number of antiquities to take back to Sweden. By all accounts he was a talented archeologist who contributed greatly to early understanding of the site – but he was also a foreigner looting American treasures (highly ironic to the Native tribespeople of the time I am sure….).
• John Lacey, an Iowa congressman, spearheaded the Antiquities Act to protect important historic sites. Teddy Roosevelt signed the act into law.
• Here is why all that really matters….beyond the obvious benefit of making it a criminal offense to loot/deface/otherwise disturb important cultural sites, Teddy Roosevelt (TR) used it as an executive order of sorts to start creating national monuments. I suppose if you think about it too much, it was the worst kind of presidential overreach (he used it to protect the Grand Canyon b/c congress wouldn’t make it a national park) but with the benefit of hindsight that one act has done so much to preserve our heritage. In fact every president except Nixon/Ford/Regan/HW Bush has used this Act to add additional sites to our national treasure chest.
• Last but not least TR’s misuse of the Antiquities Act makes me love him that much more!

Ok, done geeking out! We arrived Friday evening and did a quick hike up to the tallest point in MV. Gorgeous sunset. And an added benefit – I was able to catch a quick pic of my eldest before she caught me and started making goofy faces! Amazing to think we were standing on the same land the Pueblo people farmed over 600 years before.

On Saturday and Sunday we took 3 ranger guided tours at MV – the Cliff Palace, Balcony House and Long House tours. The sites are generally similar – but I am glad we did all three. They varied in scale, design and preserved details. Highlights for me:

• Ingenuity. The Pueblos were so clever. Tucking their homes under the Mesa provided them with protection from the elements, a firm foundation to build upon and access to the precious little water that existed at the time – seep springs that filtered through the sandstone, basically putting clean, filtered drinking water in their homes.
• Construction/Architecture. The buildings are beautiful. Round ones (kivas), square ones, one story/two story. All different in scale and design. One of the coolest discoveries was seeing corn cobs used as chinking in the morter – still there in this dry climate 600 years later! I didn’t get a picture of that – but I did get a close up of the regular chinking you can see all over the ruins.
• The view from the dwellings – a vast sweep of the canyon from each dwelling we visited.

And as always, I slowed the entire group down identifying flowers. The flora of the desert southwest is so different than that of the alpine region. We saw paintbrush and penstemon [varieties of which we saw earlier in the sub-alpine region] but we also saw new flowers. Scarlet Gilia [Ipomopsis aggregate] is the red flower – I only saw this once on a cliff as we hiked down to Long House. Copper Mallow [sphaeralcea coccinea] is the sweet apricot hued flower. It grew up on the mesa in and around the grasses of the high desert. The last picture is definitely a lupine – I think Silvery Lupine [lupine argenteus]. Good thing we were in a National Park or I would have been tempted to pick mounds of this! The last picture is of a collared lizard. I included this because Hazel was wild for the lizards! We saw numerous lizards and she tired to chase each of them. This guy was a riot – I swear he was posing. He actually kept moving toward us – strutting a little and moving his head from side to side to show off his colors. Hilarious. Poor Hazel was a little crestfallen that she couldn’t adopt him. Ah well, it is the National Park, you can’t take anything with you!

Sad to leave the sights of Mesa Verde – but must move on to bake in the desert. Canyonland and Arches here we come!