click on and look close - there is a village in there!
Mesa Verde National Park
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After the family left we decided to visit Mesa Verde National Park in SW Colorado. The drive was easy thru Indian reservations on high mountain plains. We passed thru Navajo, Hopi and Ute territory and encountered red clay hoodoos that looked like giant hand formed sculptures - standing tall like sentinels of the desert. We passed towering mesas of stone with alluvial skirts flowing out beneath them. The southwest is so beautiful and varied and so difficult to describe. I adore the vastness and the palette. It affects me at my core. It is similar, for me, in scope, as to sitting at the front windows of Windmill Lane and looking out over the bay. To look at the vastness of the earth spread out before you. Moving, changing with the light and going on forever.
Mesa Verde National Park was created in 1906 to preserve the architectural heritage of the ancient Pueblo people. And it was women who engaged in the campaign to inform the public and members of Congress about the need to preserve the cliff dwellings and protect this rich cultural heritage. Lucy Peabody and Virginia McClurg were the voices and Mary Tileston Hemenway, a Boston socialite, gave the money to begin preservation efforts. In 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt signed the Antiquities Act creating Mesa Verde as a national park.
heading up a mesa
Mesa Verde National Park
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We drove to the top of a mesa!
I had always thought that mesa tops were flat, dead ... like something ended there.
Hell no!
We climbed another 2,000' and there was an entirely new ecosystem there.... a new world that actually looked down on the high prairie below. It blew my mind. What was it like living up here in the mesa? Entire communities lived and flourished here for over 700 years and then in the late 1200's they left - and no one is exactly sure why. But their legacy remains and it is incredible.
click on and look close - there is a village in there!
Mesa Verde National Park
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The cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde are astonishing. We only got to look at them from afar but they are, none the less, exquisite to look at. How did they do it? Create each brick within the cleave of the cliff? Bring it in? There are many "villages" scattered on the two mesas within the park and many archeological sites that are still being examined.
Between April and October one can purchase ranger guided tours into the some of the cliff dwellings - which might have been interesting in terms of scale - but I did like seeing them from afar and imagining. But the most important thing is that each and every one of these sites, including the remains of numerous earlier pit houses that have been discovered are being preserved.
This is our National Park system!
This is what keeps us connected to our SHARED heritage!
Please do not let anyone take this away from future generations.
This is important!
colors of the high desert
Mesa Verde National Park
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