Mesa Verde National Park

What an amazing trip. History, nature, & a spectacular view all in one. My only regrets were that we didn’t have time to go on the guided tours and that this is where my grandmother realized her fear of heights. I felt like i was on top of the world as i looked out at one of the view points. I also really enjoyed getting into the history of the different houses. It was amazing!!!

I went there with my boyfriend for my birthday and it was pretty awesome. There are guided tours which you have to pay for, but also plenty of self-guided places to walk for free. We tent-camped for one night (about $20) in the park. This was a week before they closed camping sites for the winter. The weather was great during the day, but at night it got cold quick. It was 32 degrees when we went to sleep and 18 degrees when we woke up the next morning! Our blankets were covered in ice. Saw some great wildlife, deers everywhere! But, although it was a great experience, camping at this time of year is a bit uncomfortable.

But there’s a lot of it that I didn’t remember from 4th grade.

We stopped in at Mesa Verde on the way to New Mexico.

Things that I did not recall:

• That the ruins were so far from the main highway (about 25 miles).
• That to get to the ruins the road climbed to an extremely high elevation.
• That the road was soooooo terribly winding.

All that aside, Mesa Verde is a great place to visit. I just have to remember to arrive a little earlier in the day. We arrived at the gate around 2:30 p.m. Although we got to see a lot in the amount of time that we were there, I felt a little bit too rushed.

I will be visiting this place again later this summer. The last time that I visited I was in about the 4th grade.

I am looking forward to going back and this time bringing my family with me.

I would really like to see the cave dwellings at Mesa Verde. National Parks are generally not my thing, but cities are. I would love to visit this ancient Native American “city”.

It’s a tad crowded for what it is which makes is harder to imagine this place as it might have been back in the day, still it is pretty amazing. If you go give yourself time to hike around and take a tour. The tour guides are packed with interesting ‘did you know’s’.

This is a really amazing place. I can’t wait to go back and take my kids.

Visiting Mesa Verde National Park in my youth fueled my interest the history of the first people and of the southwest beyond the required subjects taught in New Mexico’s public schools. I had been to many ruins and museums in the southwest prior to my visit to Mesa Verde, yet somehow climbing the same cliffs as the ancients and viewing the land much as they may have seen it brought it all home and made the stories I had heard in school and artifacts I had seen in museums seem more real and tangible and at the same time; inspiring.

Mesa Verde, the park, was then, and I suspect is still now, a little known historical treasure that is well worth a visit of more than a day or two.

If you perused my page, you will have come to the conslusion I’m a national park buff. If fact I plan to mark and write up every US national park I’ve visited, Mesa Verde is one of the most unique because its primary attraction is archaelogical not natural. But it’s also one of the best parks. Its well preserved cliff dwelling are stunning and other-worldly. It ranks with Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, and Yosemite as the jewels of the national park system.

This place is good and worth seeing, but if you like the Anasazi Ruins you must go to Chaco Canyon