Mesa Verde

   Green table, for those of you wondering what was the origin of Mesa Verde, it being the name given by the early Spanish explorers some ages ago upon discovering this part of the land in the Southwest; how could they have known that this wasn't a flat table at all but rather a sloping piece of land that had been carved away as diligently by water as had the nearby Grand Canyon, and thus is more properly defined as a "cuesta" by geologists?  It all sounds so simple, especially as one views the "mesa" from afar; but as one continues to climb the tight road up to the top, a two-lane road often made even smaller by the car-sized chunks of rocks that have fallen off the upper ledges and line the side, rocks which easily outweigh even the heaviest buses and could easily send them careening over the sheer drop to the side, one begins to try and comprehend the time scale that the Mancos River must be on.  To our side were the steep drops, those stomach-churning edges that don't allow the driver to look away for guard rails are few and far between here (there is almost nowhere to drive in a pylon support)...and still it seemed that we were going higher (from the park entrance to the flat top above is about a 50-minute drive).  It was all a prelude to our destination, the top of the "mesa" and a search for any flat ground that might lay far below us; and it was there, just underneath us in many cases, that sat the caves and alcoves that once held the largest settlement of cliff dwellers in this continent.  We were slowly and carefully making our way into Mesa Verde National Park.

The carved "mesa," which is much larger than if appears from below.

To be honest we didn't really know what to expect for visiting any ancient site still leaves one with a sense of wonder.  Easter Island, Stonehenge, heiaus, burial mounds, and now cliff dwellings.  Who were these people and how did their societies function and survive and populate?  And what were their rituals, how did they live, die, and give birth?  Did they worry about the future or did they just live day to day?  What skills did they have that we no longer understand or perhaps ever duplicate?  As our car climbed further and further up the precipice we could only wonder if the remnants of what was once a thriving peoples would prove any different from us today?  A cataclysmic event that would leave our world barren for thousands upon thousands of years, our buildings and roads becoming rusting remnants and now buried beneath miles of ocean or solidified rock.  Imagine the next form of life, or perhaps a visiting form of life uncovering a tiny scrap of something, a bent pillar now so eroded that it would look as pocked and gapped as a statue from Atlantis.  Our oceans of plastic and waste now having had time to break back down to its petroleum origins, would have likely created a new form of oil and would keep the new discoverers guessing, our historical archives and records unable to avoid being eroded into dust and tiny fragments of something barely poking out from a rock as if struggling to remain a surviving fossil.  Did a form of life once live here, they might ask, and if so, what did they do to survive?

   Geologists used to term the people here at Mesa Verde part of the Anazazi, a generalized Navajo term that loosely is thought to translate as "foreign ancestors," a term since corrected to a more defining term of Ancestral Pueblo, as if removing the "foreign" portion was necessary since the people were here a thousand years before the arrival of the actual foreigners, that of Columbus and his boat and crew first touching the shores of a small island in the Bahamas in 1492, a place far from these southwest cliffs.  The discoveries made from these ancestral cliff dwellers are thought to have been their discards, pieces of pottery and bones and such tossed over the side as if into a landfill (perhaps the landfills of today will also become our lasting historical repositories).  And historians can only speculate what made the people leave, taking virtually every bit of evidence of their lives with them.  Droughts had come and gone, as shown by the tree rings in the area; so did they over hunt, or decimate the arid land's capability after raising and storing crops for 700 years, asked historians?  Was it a catastrophic disease and if so, where were all the bones or burial areas?  Even the prospect of another warring invader had been dismissed by most since all signs pointed to a peaceful departure.  The early cattlemen who discovered the site are thought to have looted and sold whatever pieces they found; but even the Swedish excavator who came later in 1891 and is partially credited with mapping the dwellings, took his own collection of lootings back to his home country; all of this rampant scavenging led to Congress passing the Antiquities Act some 15 years in 1906 in a desperate bid to try and save what little bits of history remained (the Act remains in effect to this day).

Many of these ladder "routes" follow the

ancient foot/handholds carved into the rock.

   Once at the top of the cuesta (so named due to its 7% slope), it was surprising to ponder its size and the difficulty of reaching its tops, all of which only brought us more questions.  Why choose here as a place to farm (corn and other crops were grown on the top of this area), an effort made more difficult by the constant ups and downs in getting to the dwellings harbored just below us and out of sight.*  It would take hand holds and foot holds carved into the rocks, over and over, and would mean that their tools and babies would have to go with them day after day (one distinctive feature of many of the Ancestral Pueblo became the flat backs of their heads, a disfigurement caused by the switch from a softer flexible backing to a rigid support board when babies were placed in their "cradle;" to this day other such cultural practices such as the frog-style carrying of a baby where the legs are splayed out across the mothers' abdomen or back still can lead to disfiguring hip displacement in later life).  For the constant groups of tourists wanting to view the sites up close vs. the distant viewings from cars or blocked off viewpoints, the park service had reconstructed log ladders.  Vast areas of other sites in the area had been studied and then backfilled with dirt to protect them from exposure and help to preserve them for future scientists; but these very few had been opened to the public, a small number of the nearly 5000 dwellings already mapped and discovered in this area.  And for the small fee of $5, the rangers would escort the curious past the gates and the barricades and answer all the questions, emphasizing that our history wasn't one of technology or moon landings.  This, the buildings and farms and ranches and traces of hidden life, was our beginnings, the true origins of what we now call America...and we were about to discover what lay hidden below.


*The gentle slope actually seems to have provided the perfect amount of sun and drainage for farming, evidence by a series of thousands of small "check dams" which caught the runoff silt, full of nutrients and able to more efficiently hold water during times of drought.