| Another early start to... |
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| Mesa Verde National Park. |
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| This park is a good combination of nature and history. |
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| A traveler in 1892 described a trail on this ridge as the Crinkly Edge Trail. In 1911, five years after the park was established, it became the Knife Edge Road, a new section of the main park road. It closed in 1914, but reopened in 1924, where it remained in use until 1957 when a tunnel was completed. |
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| The Park Point Fire Lookout Tower, the highest point in Mesa Verde, elevation 8572 feet. |
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 The early morning view from the lookout tower. |
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| There have been fires in the park. These are some remnants of one of those fires. |
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| The pithouse. I found a podcast that I
listened to on the Mesa Top Loop, which was nice. But I will be
using a guidebook for descriptions. While nomadic people lived in the area for thousands of years, permanent farmsteads began to appear on the mesa around 550 CE. |
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| Navajo Canyon. |
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| I have seen cliff dwellings on other trips, but this one is quite impressive. It includes the tallest standing architecture in Mesa Verde, a four-story 27-foot tall structure that was part of an even larger building complex. |
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| See, the ancient people built modern structures too. |
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| But seriously, there are the remains of two pithouses here, the nearer one was built sometime after 675 CE. Charred posts, a baked clay floor and the presence of artifacts show it was destroyed by fire, probably still in use. Within a few years, a second, single-room pithouse was built on top of the antechamber of the first. |
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| I probably did not need to tale a picture of every one of these things. They do start to look alike after a while. |
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| If I am not mistaken, that little hole in the back was a ventilator shaft. |
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| A kiva is multi-purpose underground room that were central to Pueblo community life. A flat ground-level roof of latticed beams covered the kiva. |
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| I may have taken too many pictured of these too. |
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| Remember that these things were built almost a thousand years ago. |
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| Not all structures were dug into the ground. |
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| This was the middle of what was one of the last mesa top pueblos built at Mesa Verde. |
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| Here we are at Sun Point View. |
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| Imagine living here in around 1200-1300 CE, seeing your neighbors' doors glowing with firelight and hearing the sounds of singing, laughter, barking dogs and crying babies echoing off the canyon walls. |
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| I could do without the dog and baby noise. |
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| She sells seashells by the seashore. I'm running out of things to write. |
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| You have to admit that building into canyon walls is a pretty good way to provide shelter. |
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 Think they had homeowners associations back then? |
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| It is a grand canyon, not capitalized. |
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| This is a huge complex. They have tours of some of the ruins. They were sold out and I didn't want to take all the time it would take. I have seen other cliff dwellings in other places. |
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| I realize that efforts to preserve
ruins are necessary, but putting concrete or whatever that is on top
kind of ruins the look. But anyway, the Sun Temple was built sometime in the 1200's and is somewhat of a mystery. Its D-shaped outline, no evidence of roofing, few doors or household artifacts and massive architecture is unlike any other structure in the park. |
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| Okay, last picture. |
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