Mesa Verde National Park

Exploring Ancient Cliff Dwellings and Ancestral Pueblo History

by Celeste Lipford and Terry Lipford - last updated on 11/11/2024

The Mesa Verde National Park entrance sign is 7.8 miles west past Mancos and you will exit right and then turn left to cross over route 160. As soon as you cross the highway, you will note the road forks, go left into the visitor's center or right to proceed up the mountain to the cliff dwelling sites. If you are looking for trail maps or park information, the visitor center will be able to provide you with that kind of information.

Since this was our first time visiting the park, we stopped and acquired maps & information about what was open & not open. You could acquire the same information online at the National Park Service Mesa Verde site.

Mesa Verde is located within the expansive Colorado Plateau, a vast geographic region encompassing approximately 130,000 square miles and spanning parts of Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico. This plateau is renowned for its stunning landscapes, which feature dramatic canyons, mesas, and diverse geological formations. Mesa Verde itself occupies a unique position in the southwestern corner of Colorado, sitting at the heart of this remarkable region.

Designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, Mesa Verde is not only a geological marvel but also a place of immense historical and cultural significance. The park's iconic cliff dwellings, built by the Ancestral Puebloans, are perched within the towering sandstone cliffs, providing a window into the lives of the people who thrived here over 700 years ago. Surrounded by the rugged beauty of the Colorado Plateau, visitors to Mesa Verde can explore its rich history and breathtaking vistas, making it a must-visit destination for those seeking both natural and cultural treasures.

Image Credits:

Image is the property of National Park Service via their website. and this map gives you a better idea of how large this park is. All other images (unless otherwise noted) are the property of Just Traveling Thru, LLC.

Once we departed the visitor center and proceeded up the mountain, we drove along a series of switchbacks that provided views of the valleys to the east & west. You should consider taking advantage of the turnouts to get some pictures, as the views are very good. Our next goal was the Spruce Tree House area.

Our next hike was on the Spruce Canyon Trail - and once we saw how steep the Spruce Canyon Trail was, we wound up going just past the cliff dwelling ruins and then we turned back so we could explore the rest of the park. The views of the dwellings are better at the top of the trail, so take advantage.

Spruce Tree House (located above the Spruce Canyon Trail, image # 1 above) was the equivalent of an Puebloan block of flats when it was built in 1210, with 130 rooms home to 60 to 80 people. The dry climate and shelter from the rocks means that it is so well preserved that it is hard to imagine it was built so long ago. When Spruce Tree House is open you can climb inside one of the kivas. These underground chambers were the heart & soul of the community, used by the Puebloans for religious ceremonies and political meetings.

Our next stop was the Cliff Palace dwelling, closed to public access because of rock falling & trail issues. So all of our images were taken from various vantage points.

Perhaps the most notable Mesa Verde cliff dwelling, Cliff Palace is the largest of its kind in North America. The structure consists of sandstone and wooden beams held together by a homemade mortar consisting of soil, water, and ash. Small bits of stone were mixed into the mortar, reinforcing its strength.

Cliff Palace is entirely unique in its size and is actually considered a village in and of itself. The palace boasts 150 rooms, and it’s thought to have housed more than 100 residents in its 13th-century glory days. Rooms are roughly 6 by 8 feet, and it’s believed that larger groups of people as well as families would share the space. Some of the rooms were even originally adorned in bright, cheery colors, including pinks, reds, and yellows. The Anasazi people utilized smaller rooms to store crops, and the large, circular rooms, called kivas, hosted rituals and ceremonies.

Image Credits:

Image #1 (top of this section) is the property of MARELBU via Wikimedia Commons using the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license. All other images are the property of Just Traveling Thru, LLC unless otherwise noted.

Mesa Verde's Sun Temple is thought to have been an astronomical observatory. This is because Pueblonians used astronomical observations to plan their farming and religious ceremonies, drawing on both natural features in the landscape and masonry structures built for this purpose.

The temple is D-shaped, and its alignment is 10.7 degrees off true east–west. Its location and orientation indicate that its builders understood the cycles of both the sun and the moon. It is aligned to the major lunar standstill, which occurs once every 18.6 years, and the sunset during the winter solstice, which can be viewed setting over the temple from a platform at the south end of Cliff Palace, across Fewkes Canyon. At the bottom of the canyon is the Sun Temple fire pit, which is illuminated by the first rays of the rising sun during the winter solstice. Sun Temple is one of the largest exclusively ceremonial structures ever built by the Ancestral Puebloans.