Mesa Verde Popular National Park In Southwest Colorado Guards 700-Year-Old Mystery Of Anasazi Cliff Dwellers

You won’t find many 700-year-old ghost towns out West.

The best place to look is Mesa Verde National Park in the Four Corners region of southwestern Colorado, site of not only the biggest archeological preserve in the nation, but also the largest cliff dwelling in North America.

Named “green table” by passing Spanish explorers, Mesa Verde rises abruptly from the valleys, its flat top trimmed with trees. The indigenous people who settled here - called Anasazi (awn-uh-SAW-zee) - created a continually maturing culture that’s now a panorama frozen in time.

Winding up the entrance road that climbs the north end of the escarpment, I passed geological eons. The mesa top, about 7,000 feet above sea level, tilts downward to the south where sharp canyons slice the land into slivers of earth. The soft sandstone of the canyon cliffs eroded in spots, forming the alcoves where the Anasazi made their last stand.

It was a 15-mile drive to the Far View Visitor Center, with two mule deer and three wild turkeys browsing the edge of the pinyon pine-Utah juniper forest. Last summer a large fire blackened nearly 4,800 acres, the scarred landscape visible along the road. No sites open to the public were damaged, however.

After picking up tickets to the most popular ruins, I drove six more miles to Chapin Mesa. There, the short-but-steep walk to the vacant village of Spruce Tree House was my first meeting with another people, another time.

Sheltered in a stony ledge, the cube-shaped houses fashioned from sandstone blocks waited patiently for their builders to return. Rectangular windows showed no life within. In front was a reconstructed kiva (KEE-vuh), the round, underground religious and ceremonial chamber of the Anasazi.

I clambered down the ladder through the square opening in the ground-level roof. The floor was pockmarked by a firepit in the middle and a lesser hole to one side, the sipapu (SEE-pah-poo) - the symbolic entrance to the underworld. Except for the noisy visitors above, I was back in pre-Columbian times.

The trail zigzagged back to the park museum where I inspected an ancient medicine man’s kit, sort of a doctor’s black bag. It was full of curiosities like quartz crystals, shell beads traded from the Pacific Coast, and a little stone pipe in a weasel-skin pouch.

A different display held a large pot painted with the distinctive Mesa Verde black-on-white geometric design. The pot’s contents spilled out - 31 pounds of corn saved for seven centuries.

How did these original Americans survive? They cleared trees from the mesa top for fields of corn, beans and squash. They needed scant clothing in summer, but blankets of yucca fiber with turkey feathers or rabbit fur warmed them in winter. Water came from collected rain, or springs and seeps near the alcoves. Trash was thrown down the precipice, providing fertile material for archeologists. The low winter sun slipped into their towns past the overhanging crags, heating the houses.

Cliff Palace was my next stop. Its 217 rooms and 23 kivas curve around a crescent-shaped niche. This largest cliff dwelling, celebrated in photographs from all seasons, was a small city in itself. Two towers, one rectangular and one round, stood out in the jumble of desolate apartments. I poked my head inside the square tower to inspect some wall paintings of jagged red lines floating above a mountainous horizon.

A park ranger told us to look at, but not touch, a toehold in the cliff face visible on the way up and out of Cliff Palace. The Anasazi used these perilous perches to climb the vertical stone walls. Amazingly, impressions of toes were still visible, worn into the rock.

Nearby, Ruins Road took me on a loop drive through six centuries of Anasazi culture. Their first dwellings were pithouses, partly above and partly below ground. These developed in two directions: wholly underground kivas and above-ground stone houses called pueblos. Signs by the road marked stops for excavated examples of all of these.

Still farther, Square Tower House rose silently beneath a high overlook, four stories of proud masonry. At the last stop, Cliff Palace stood grandly across the chasm.

Balcony House was high adventure. A 32-foot ladder was the only way up. I gratefully followed the ranger’s advice not to look down.

A girl about seven years old quizzed the ranger, “Did you make this ladder?” She didn’t.

Once on top, a preteen boy begged the leader, “Can I go again?” He couldn’t.

When I crawled through the tunnel connecting the two parts of this archaic edifice, I thought my camera gear wouldn’t squeeze through. It did.

Finally, when I clutched the chain along the enlarged cliff-face toeholds to leave the ruin, I summoned my strength. It came.

Mesa Verde guards two great mysteries: Why did the Anasazi move from the mesa top to the gorge walls around 1200 A.D.? And why did they abandon their rocky ramparts and forsake Mesa Verde altogether less than a hundred years later?

Pressure from enemies and colder climate are two theories for the move under the canyon rims, but neither explanation is certain.

Tree rings, though, show a long drought in the decades before 1300 A.D., which likely forced the hungry bands south after their crops failed. It was the final struggle - a literal cliffhanger.

“Family by family, small group by small group, they left their dwellings,” explained the leader of my Balcony House tour. The blood of this vanished race probably still flows in the Pueblo Indian tribes of Arizona and New Mexico.

Besides Chapin Mesa, the other area open to the public is Wetherill Mesa to the west. A tram shuttled me about the mesa, stopping for ruins overlooks and a tour of Long House, the second-largest dwelling in the park with 150 rooms.

The ranger there told us about prayer sticks. Watchful natives wedged these into cracks in the roof of their recess. If a crack widened, the stick would fall out, signaling a move to safer quarters.

Hiking in the park is limited to prevent disturbing any cultural artifacts. Petroglyph Point Trail looped 2.8 miles to a rock full of prehistoric carvings looking like ancient graffiti. A lizard skittered across the trail, and a raven croaked its gravelly caw as I trod by eerie boulders with holes worn by wind and water.

Later, an up-and-down trail near Cedar Tree Tower led me a quarter mile to farming terraces worked by hand a millennium ago. They seemed like a staircase for giants, marching up the hill.

Pondering these lonely ruins made me think how little and how much humans have changed over the past seven centuries. But a ranger at Cliff Palace cautioned me about rushing to conclusions based on these ghost cities. “It’s like someone looking at the World Trade Center and trying to figure out what we are like.”

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: IF YOU GO Getting there: Mesa Verde National Park is in the Four Corners region of southwestern Colorado on Highway 160. The entrance is 36 miles west of Durango and 10 miles east of Cortez. Admission: The entrance fee is $10 per car. Because of crowding, tickets are required to visit Cliff Palace, Balcony House and Long House. Pick these up on the day of your visit at Far View Visitor Center, which opens at 8 a.m. In summer, a long line usually forms by 7:30 a.m. Tickets are $1.35 each. When to go: The park is open year-round, but the most popular ruins (that admit only ranger-conducted tours) and all of Wetherill Mesa are closed in winter. This year Cliff Palace opened April 13, Balcony House opens May 11 and Long House/Wetherill Mesa opens Memorial Day. Where to stay: Your only choices in the park are Morefield Campground and Far View Lodge. The campground is open from mid-April to mid-October and charges $9 per night ($17 for sites with hookups). No reservations are accepted, but this large campground rarely fills, even in summer. Far View Lodge is open from April 24 to Oct. 25 this year. Single and double rooms are $94 from June 13 to Oct. 4, and vary from $73 to $84 before and after. Extra guests are $8 per person. For reservations, call (970) 529-4421. Where to eat: Food services operate in summer at the Far View and Spruce Tree areas, and also at Morefield Campground. Other things to see and do: The Anasazi Heritage Center is outside the national park, 18 miles northwest of the park entrance (three miles west of Dolores on Highway 184). This is a modern museum with hands-on exhibits. Admission is $3 for adults, ages 17 and under free. For information, call (970) 882-4811. Park information: Contact Superintendent, Mesa Verde National Park, Mesa Verde, CO 81330; telephone (970) 529-4475.