Mesa Verde National Park

Mesa Verde National Park is a national park and UNESCO World Heritage Site located in Montezuma County, Colorado, situated near the Four Corners region of the American Southwest. Established by President Theodore Roosevelt on June 29, 1906, as the first national park dedicated to cultural preservation, Mesa Verde stands apart from virtually every other unit in the national park system by virtue of what it protects: not scenery or wilderness alone, but the accumulated architectural and cultural legacy of an entire civilization. Mesa Verde National Park was established on June 29, 1906, and is the largest of the National Park Service parcels protecting cultural resources in Colorado, with nearly 5,000 documented sites, including about 600 cliff dwellings. For over 700 years, the Ancestral Pueblo people built thriving communities on the mesas and in the cliffs of Mesa Verde; today, the park protects the rich cultural heritage of 27 Pueblos and Tribes and offers visitors a spectacular window into the past.

Geography and Setting

Mesa Verde National Park is located in Montezuma County, Colorado, and is the only World Heritage Site in Colorado. The entrance to the park is on U.S. Route 160, approximately 9 miles (14 km) east of the community of Cortez and 7 miles (11 km) west of Mancos, Colorado.

Mesa Verde, Spanish for "green mesa," earned its name because of its relatively lush cover of piñon and juniper forest. The mesa's higher-than-average elevation (6,000–8,570 feet above sea level) and dependable precipitation (16.4 inches per year) made it an excellent setting for early habitation. Despite its familiar name, the term "mesa" is technically imprecise. Although the area's first Spanish explorers named the feature Mesa Verde, the term is a misnomer, as true mesas are almost perfectly flat. Because Mesa Verde is slanted to the south, the proper geological term is cuesta, not mesa. The park is made up of several smaller cuestas located between canyons.

Mesa Verde's canyons were created by streams that eroded the hard sandstone that covers the area. This resulted in elevations ranging from about 6,000 to 8,572 feet (1,829 to 2,613 m), with the highest elevation at Park Point. The terrain in the park is now a transition zone between the low desert plateaus and the Rocky Mountains. Crucially, it was the southward tilt of the plateau that gave rise to the distinctive alcoves sheltering the park's most famous structures: Mesa Verde's slant contributed to the formation of the alcoves that have preserved the area's cliff dwellings.

The park is bordered to the east by the Ute Mountain Tribal Park. The Ute Mountain Tribal Park, adjoining Mesa Verde National Park to the east of the mountains, is approximately 125,000 acres (51,000 ha) along the Mancos River.

Ancestral Pueblo Habitation

Ancestral Pueblo people first arrived in the area of Mesa Verde National Park around 550 CE. Skilled basketweavers and later potters, they were a nomadic people in transition to a more settled way of life. At Mesa Verde, they farmed crops such as beans, corn, and squash and supplemented their diet by gathering wild plants and hunting deer, rabbits, squirrels, and other game. At first, they lived in pithouses, usually dug into the ground on the mesatops, but sometimes also located in alcoves in the cliffs.

The earliest well-established construction date for a small farming hamlet on Mesa Verde proper is approximately AD 580–90. Settlements and population increased rapidly over the next two centuries, so the population estimate for the entire mesa is 750 people between AD 725 and 800. Over time, architecture grew increasingly sophisticated. During the period from about 550 to 1300, Pre-Columbian Indians established communities throughout Mesa Verde, first building pithouses, then elaborate stone villages (pueblos), and finally about 600 cliff dwellings situated in alcoves and caves high on the canyon walls.

True to its name, Mesa Verde offered sweeping plateaus and forested landscapes where early Pueblo people first settled on the mesa tops. It was not until the final century of their time here — between CE 1190 and CE 1300 — that they began building the cliff dwellings that define the park today. The cliff dwellings represent the pinnacle of Ancestral Puebloan construction. Some 600 cliff dwellings built of sandstone and mud mortar have been recorded within Mesa Verde National Park — including the famous multi-storey Cliff Palace, Balcony House, and Square Tower House — and an additional 4,300 archaeological sites have been discovered. The cliff dwelling sites range in size from small storage structures to large villages of 50 to 200 rooms.

By the early 1200s stability had returned, and the population of the Mesa Verde region was increasingly drawn into large, walled villages in canyon-head settings or smaller settlements built into difficult-to-reach canyon-wall recesses. The best-known sites associated with the park are those dating to 1220–90. These sites are built into the natural alcoves of the Cliff House Sandstone in the western half of the national park. The largest two or three of these sites are estimated to have had approximately 100 to 200 rooms in use at their peak.

The departure of the Ancestral Pueblo people from Mesa Verde remains one of the region's most discussed historical questions. Archaeological evidence points to a series of prolonged droughts, diminishing resources, and social upheaval as factors that may have contributed to these changes. By the end of the 13th century, the once bustling Mesa Verde region was almost completely depopulated. By the 1280s, the sounds of construction that had filled the air moved southward toward the Pueblos of today — on the Hopi mesas of Arizona and along the Rio Grande and its tributaries in New Mexico.

Establishment and Preservation History

Established in 1906, a full decade before the National Park Service was created, Mesa Verde is a comparatively old national park and the very first to be created for the specific purpose of protecting and preserving the works of humans. The road to its creation was shaped significantly by two Colorado women. While male scientists and treasure hunters sought to extract artifacts and knowledge from the site, two Colorado women — Virginia Donaghe McClurg and Lucy Peabody — sought to preserve it. Their campaign marshaled the conservationist spirit that gripped many white Americans at the time, including President Theodore Roosevelt, and culminated in Mesa Verde's designation as a national park.

The campaign to establish a national park at Mesa Verde began in the late 1880s when journalist Virginia McClurg began lobbying federal officials to protect the Mesa Verde archaeological resources. McClurg had visited the Mesa Verde cliff dwellings for the first time in 1872. She returned with an expedition in 1876 and was thereafter devoted to preserving the site. She believed that federal protection would be the most certain way to achieve this goal, and that the site deserved to be a national park because of its extraordinary cultural, scientific, and scenic values.

She appealed for help from the Colorado Federation of Women's Clubs, a 5,000-member organization that was primed to address important social, economic, and political issues of the times. The CFWC formed a committee that eventually became the Colorado Cliff Dwellings Association. The CCDA not only sponsored vigorous public education campaigns on behalf of Mesa Verde preservation, but also funded mapping projects and built the first wagon road to the site.

Meanwhile, a fellow activist for protection of Mesa Verde and prehistoric archaeological sites included Lucy Peabody, who, located in Washington, D.C., met with members of Congress to further the cause. By 1905 the CCDA had convinced both the public and Congress that a national park should be established at Mesa Verde. That year, Colorado representative Herschel Hogg submitted the first Mesa Verde National Park bill to survive a congressional committee. The following year, Colorado senator Thomas Patterson submitted a bill to the Senate. The legislation ultimately succeeded, and Mesa Verde National Park was established on June 29, 1906.

By the late 19th century, the threat posed by looters was already severe. By the end of the 19th century, it was clear that Mesa Verde needed protection from people in general who came to Mesa Verde and created or sold their own collection of artifacts. In later decades, a series of wildfires between 1996 and 2003 paradoxically advanced archaeological knowledge. Prior to those fires, archaeologists had surveyed approximately ninety percent of the park. Dense undergrowth and tree cover kept many ancient sites hidden from view, but after the Chapin V, Bircher, and Pony fires, 593 previously undiscovered sites were revealed — most of them dating to the Basketmaker III and Pueblo I periods. Also uncovered were extensive water containment features, including 1,189 check dams, 344 terraces, and five reservoirs that date to the Pueblo II and III periods.

Notable Sites and Archaeology

Mesa Verde's most celebrated structure is Cliff Palace, the largest cliff dwelling in North America. At Mesa Verde, multistoried dwellings fill the cliff-rock alcoves that rise 2,000 feet above Montezuma Valley. Remarkably preserved, the cliff dwellings cluster in canyons that slice the mesa into narrow tablelands.

Many other archaeological sites, such as pit-house settlements and masonry-walled villages of varying size and complexity, are distributed over the mesas. Non-habitation sites include farming terraces and check dams, field houses, reservoirs and ditches, shrines and ceremonial features, as well as rock art.

The park is organized into two primary visitor areas. On Chapin Mesa, visitors find Cliff Palace, Balcony House, Spruce Tree House, the Far View sites, and a self-guided auto tour along Mesa Top Loop Road with numerous mesa-top sites and views of the cliff dwellings. Step House, also located in an alcove on Wetherill Mesa, is unusual because visitors can clearly see both dwellings from the 600s and a pueblo from the 1220s, when it was re-occupied by Ancestral Pueblo people.

The park's on-site museum is a landmark in its own right. The Chapin Mesa Archeological Museum, built in 1924, contains information exhibits and a bookstore of artifacts of the Ancestral Puebloans. The museum is five miles from the Far View Visitor Center. More recently, the Mesa Verde Visitor and Research Center is located just off of Highway 160 and before the park entrance booths; the Visitor and Research Center opened in December 2012.

Recognition and Visitation

In 1978, Mesa Verde National Park was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in recognition of its exceptional archaeological relevance. The UNESCO designation affirmed what archaeologists had long recognized: the Mesa Verde landscape is a remarkably well-preserved prehistoric settlement landscape of the Ancestral Puebloan culture, which lasted for almost nine hundred years from c. 450 to 1300. This plateau in southwest Colorado, which sits at an altitude of more than 2,600 meters, contains a great concentration of spectacular Pueblo Indian dwellings, including the well-known cliff dwellings.

In 2021, Mesa Verde was certified as the world's 100th International Dark Sky Park. The designation recognizes the park's exceptionally clear night skies and its suitability for astronomical observation. This World Heritage Site and International Dark Sky Park is home to over a thousand species, including several that live nowhere else on earth.

Today, Mesa Verde National Park hosts more than 500,000 visitors per year and remains a sacred and important place for multiple Indigenous nations, especially the Pueblo people of New Mexico. A World Heritage site, Mesa Verde has been named "Number One Historic Monument in the World" by Condé Nast Traveler and "One of 50 Places to Visit in a Lifetime" by National Geographic.

Access to cliff dwellings is carefully managed to protect the fragile structures. A reservation on a ranger-led tour is required to enter a cliff dwelling. Due to the fragile nature of the archaeological sites in the park, hiking is limited; however, there are several excellent hikes available, including one to a fascinating petroglyph panel. Lodging options exist both within the park and in surrounding communities. Far View Lodge, located right in the heart of Mesa Verde National Park, is the most convenient location for visiting the park and offers the best views from any accommodations in the area; situated 8,250 feet above sea level, Far View Lodge offers spectacular views into four states.