Mesa Verde

The Cliff Palace Ruin

Cliff Dwellings from Chapin Mesa

The Yucca Plants were in Bloom

Notice the fire damage due to lightening on the left side of the canyon

This is our second trip to Mesa Verde. On the first trip we toured the Balcony House. On this trip, we decided to tour the Cliff Palace. Both tours are quite fun, especially getting down to the ruin and getting back up from the ruin. To get to the Cliff Palace, we had to walk through some narrow rocks down over 100 stairs. To get out, we had to climb up 4 ladders.

To protect the ruins, the only way to get down to the Cliff Palace is to sign up for a guided tour and get a ticket. The ranger who guided our tour was from Mississippi. There were some folks on our tour that didn't appreciate the way he enunciated some of the words describing the various buildings. They especially had trouble when he talked about the research ongoing in Kiva I. It took some bantering back and forth before they realized he was saying "I" and note "ahye". Being from Tennessee, I had no problem understanding his dialect. The conversation reminded me of similar discussions I had trying to get people to understand me when I moved away from Tennessee.

We were surprised by the number of acres of Mesa Verde that had been burned since we were last there. We stopped at the museum and saw a display on fires. There have been three major fires started by lightening at Mesa Verde since we were last there in 1995. There was a very interesting discussion on the difficult issues the park service deals with when natural fires start in a park with so many valuable artifacts. The park service has worked with fire specialists to come up with ways of protecting the artifacts with controlled fires and digs. In the picture you can see the destruction of the plants on top of the Mesa. Fortunately, none of the cliff dwellings were damaged.