Wanderung 3

Rocky Mountain Ramble

May - July 2003

July 1st - Mesa Verde: Cliff Palace, Colorado

The high altitude and clear air also make these high desert areas cool off quickly at night, and so it proved to be at our campsite. It didn’t get really cold as it had up in Yellowstone, more like the low 50s, and that is just great for sleeping so we both had a good night’s sleep. After a quick breakfast of instant oatmeal and bananas we drove up to the park’s Visitor Center. This has to be a main stop for anyone who wants a Ranger-guided tour of the ruins because this is where they sell the tickets. We considered tickets to Balcony House but decided against it because crawling thru the 18-inch tunnel might set off Monika’s claustrophobia. Instead we purchased tickets to the 10:30 tour of Cliff Palace.

That left us a bit of time before the walk, so we stopped off along the way at Far View site. This site has a variety of “top of the mesa” ruins that represent the earlier stages of development of the Pueblo culture, and we found it very interesting. Two of the smaller brickwork pueblos antedated the amazing inside-the-cliff structures that came later, about 1200-1300 AD. I was surprised by the small sizes of the doorways just as I had been during a visit to the similar Chaco Canyon site long ago. During the tour later I asked the Ranger how big these folk were, and she said about 60 inches or 5 foot. That is certainly short and small by today’s standards, but it corresponds to the short stature of European folk in the Middle Ages due to widespread malnutrition and disease.

We also walked around a water reservoir built from brick that was about the size of a small farm pond. A sign said that it stored only about 18 inches of water, but it really looked so intact that I though it might still store the occasional rains. When we visited Mesa Verde it was very dry and the fire danger was so extreme that we were not allowed campfires or charcoal fires. Naturally this reservoir had no water, but given the drought we were surprised at how much green vegetation was on top of the mesa. In fact, the high altitude of the mesa increases the average annual precipitation to about 17-18 inches, which is a lot more than the valley below and just enough to raise maize, the main crop in those days.

We drove on to the overlook for Cliff Palace and waited for the Ranger on some shaded rocks. The sun was quite strong and even at 10:30 in the morning we both felt like staying in the shade. Cliff Palace itself is, fortunately, in a cleft that faces west so it was in the shade for our entire tour. The Ranger was a great interpreter and well-informed about Pueblo culture, in part because she lived with a Pueblo Indian in one of the inhabited Pueblos in northern New Mexico.

She gave a brief description of the development of the Ancestral Pueblan people. Altho the exact events that led to a shift from building on top of the mesa to building in the cliffs on the sides of the mesa are unclear, she enumerated several possible advantages for this shift. The advantages included a regular water supply, protection from the elements, and more defensible settlements from the competing Indian tribes. Looking at the cliff face, I could believe the advantages but could also see the major disadvantage of climbing up the face of the cliff to get to the fields every morning.

I enjoyed climbing the ladders to get down into Cliff Palace and then back up to the parking lot. I thought I might be worried, but it turned out that the park service had taking great pains to make these ladders really sturdy—they used thick beams and bolted them straight into the cliff. The steps usually had handrails, so all in all I didn’t feel insecure at any point in the descent or ascent.

After the tour we drove on to the headquarters complex that included a museum and a restaurant where we both had hamburgers and French Fries—only later did I see somebody with a turkey sandwich, which would have been a lot healthier I’m sure. For the early afternoon we visited the museum and that burned up a couple of hours. It was my kind of museum, by which I mean many display cases with artifacts and detailed explanations of how the artifact was produced and played a role in the culture. Reading all that info and studying the artifacts puts me in hog heaven, but it also takes oodles of time.

I particularly enjoyed the displays of pottery, which had been raised to a high art form by these folk, and displays about how to make stone arrowheads, bows, and arrow shafts. Of course, there are tradeoffs in any culture, and the rise of pottery after 700 AD also spelled the decline in the quality of basketry that had been demonstrated by the earlier Puebloans. Similarly, the bow and arrow completely replaced the atlatl or spear-thrower for hunting due to greater range and accuracy.

In the inevitable gift shop we purchased some cards of Mesa Verde ruins, which are generally very photogenic, and huddled in the truck with the air conditioning running while writing to friends and relatives—did I mention it was blisteringly hot? After shipping those off at the Mesa Verde post office—the postmistress promised she would hand cancel each of the cards—we decided to take the Mesa Top Loop Drive for the rest of the afternoon.

This drive has exhibits from every phase of the development of the Puebloan culture in an almost perfect chronological order. Many of the exhibits had been put under roof, which protected them from deterioration due to weathering. More to the point, the roofing also gave us some very welcome shade and respite from the sun that was still beating down out of the sky. It was definitely a situation of “in the shade—cool, in the sun—hot” and we valued every patch of shade we found.

One point of the cultural development that I found particularly interesting was the development of the kivas that are the central focal point of the religion for these folks. As the culture developed and possibly was stressed by outside threats or resource depletion, the kivas became more elaborately and precisely constructed. It reminded me of the development of religion into more extreme forms on Easter Island as it became overpopulated and resources where exhausted. Once a culture has accepted religion as the basis for “good things”, then it seems a natural development to want more and more good things by becoming more and more religious—kind of a “holier than thou” effect on a cultural scale. The local shaman could no doubt point at bad things happening and urge his flock to be more and more devout, just as the Christians in Topeka pointed at the explosion of the space shuttle to urge all Americans to be more devout. Handy, that.

Well, this religious escalation apparently ended in the Sun Temple, which was a very large, purely ceremonial building on the top of the mesa. It was started shortly before the whole Mesa Verde complex was abandoned and was in fact never completed, but the floor design was clear and it boasted DOUBLE kivas! That struck me as the usual kind of religious “more is better” magical thinking: if one kiva is good, two are better, if one prayer is good, two are better, and so on and so on. Of course, the effort expended on the Sun Temple might have been better deployed in improving the defenses of Mesa Verde, so in a perverse way it may have helped speed the exodus of the Ancestral Pueblans to the south. The current Pueblans have preserved that old-time religion as far as I can tell, and it seems to hinder any technological or economic development on their part. Apparently some still live without electricity or running water, and the life expectancies are only in the 40s according to what I was told. Oh well, I guess that’s one way of life.

Finishing the loop and returning to camp for the evening, we discussed what to do the next day and decided on riding the steam train from Durango to Silverton as a change of pace. Durango is about 30 miles east of Mesa Verde so the drive would not be too long. That way we hoped to spend most of the day on the train itself rather than driving. Clearly a cross-country trip like this necessarily involves a lot of driving, but we try to minimize it as much as possible.

Copyright 2004 by Robert W. Holt and Elsbeth Monika Holt
Prolog Map Epilog

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