Mesa Verde National Park

Good mix of busy and relaxing this weekend here in Colorado. On Friday night we went to a wine tasting with the Durango Wine Experience, though we dont have any pictures (we're trying to blend in, not look like tourists! :) it was interesting and we had fun looking around the galleries where the tastings were.

Sunday we drove out to Mesa Verde National Park in Cortez, CO, about an hour from Durango. The park is very isolated - once you reach the entrance, you drive 15 miles on winding mountain roads to get to the visitors center, then another 5 miles to any of the cliff dwellings.


View of Cliff Palace from the top of the Mesa
Mesa Verde was once the home to ancestral pueblo dwellers... they inhabited the lands of the park from 600-1300 A.D., though lived on the Mesa top until the 1200s, when they built the cliff dwellings we saw. Then everyone migrated south in the early 1300s, leaving the structures they had built.

We took a ranger-guided tour of one of the largest dwellings, Cliff Palace. The huge dwelling seems like it was primarily a meeting and ceremony place- there are over 125 rooms and only 25 appear to have been residential.


They built their adobes into the sides of the cliffs (the nature of sandstone naturally created the 'caves' in which they built)... built out of sandstone and mud, the craftsmanship was pretty amazing. And also amazing how well they have held up over the last 800 years.
Our full set of pictures from the trip can be seen below:

Get the flash player here: http://www.adobe.com/flashplayer