Mesa Verde National Park

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 National Park is breathtaking and full of history.

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

Mesa Verde is best known for a large number of well preserved cliff dwellings, houses built in shallow caves along the canyon walls. For most of the 12th and 13th centuries, the Classic Period, the Ancient Puebloan Indians lived in these dwellings. The reason for their sudden departure about 1275 remains unexplained; theories range from crop failures due to droughts to an intrusion of foreign tribes from the North.       

The Mesa Verde Administrative District was designated a National Historic Landmark on May 29, 1987. It consists of the first buildings constructed by the National Park Service (1921), which are based on cultural traditions represented in the park area. The principal designer believed that structures could be used for interpretive purposes to explain the construction of prehistoric dwellings in the Park, and be compatible with their natural and cultural setting.