Cliff Palace contains 150 rooms and 23 kivas and housed approximately 100 people, Mesa Verde National Park / Rebecca Latson

While landscapes and wildlife usually come to mind when thinking about units of the National Park System, there are national parks dedicated to the protection and preservation of human history, architecture, art, and culture. Mesa Verde National Park in southwestern Colorado is one such park.

For over 700 years (550 – 1300 CE), Ancestral Puebloans made Mesa Verde their home. They built elaborate brick-and-mortar structures – some of them several stories high – to house people, store grains, conduct meetings and perform religious ceremonies. Some of these dwellings were constructed at ground-level, while others were set high within alcoves recessed into rust- and buff-colored sandstone cliffs, safe from the elements and marauders.

An agrarian society, the Ancestral Puebloans coaxed beans, corn, and squash from the dry land, kept turkeys and dogs, and hunted rabbit, deer, and squirrels. Despite the hardships of living on the land, they found time to create art with which they decorated everything from mugs and other pottery, to bricks, to cliff dwelling walls and trailside outcrops.

Ancestral Pueblo society was rich and complex, but difficult, due to the scarcity of water, which colored every aspect of daily life. Many of their religious beliefs and ceremonies emphasized the importance of rain and water. Cliff and ground-level communities were constructed as near as possible to existing seeps and springs.

Suddenly, they picked up and left, never to return. Ancestral Puebloans left no written language, so archaeologists must learn what they can from the cliff dwellings and other ruins, pictographs and petroglyphs, and everyday items left behind like stone metates and pottery mugs.

Why these people departed so abruptly remains unknown, although theories abound, from severe drought, to overpopulation and depletion of resources, to human conflict.  It wasn’t until the late 1800s that white men explored and photographed these ruins, arguing for the creation of a national park to protect and preserve from vandalism and theft these remnants of a long-gone society. In 1906 Mesa Verde National Park was created, the same year the 1906 Antiquities Act passed, a piece of law making it a federal crime to collect or destroy any historic or prehistoric object or building on federally-owned land.

Once you decide to visit, stop first at the Mesa Verde Visitor and Research Center to explore exhibits of Ancestral Pueblo culture and daily life. Return to the park road, stopping at all the overlooks offering views of cliff dwellings placed upon landscapes molded over millions of years by a shallow sea, volcanism, mountain building, and erosion.

Mesa Verde National Park offers nearly 30 miles (48.3 km) of established trails for day hiking. While on these trails, you will probably encounter one or more of the over 300 animal species and 1,000 species of insects and other invertebrates living within or migrating through the park. You might spot a coyote following the roadside, or a colorful collared lizard basking on a sunbaked rock, or a rare black swallowtail butterfly, the larvae of which feeds on one of the park's rare endemic plants, the Mesa Verde Wandering Aletes. Backcountry hiking is not permitted, however, in an effort to protect the park's natural and archaeological resources. Hiking off-trail is also not allowed.

For up-close explorations, you can take a self-guided tour of Step House on Wetherill Mesa, or purchase a ticket to reserve a spot on a popular ranger-guided tour of Cliff Palace or Balcony House. The more adventurous of you may embark upon a guided backcountry tour of what many consider the most impressive of Mesa Verde’s cliff dwellings: Square Tower House. You'll need a reservation for this very popular tour, too. From these intimate perspectives, you can imagine what life might have been like centuries ago, before cars, computers, or smartphones.

Don’t have a ticket for the cliff dwelling tours? You can drive to the ground-level Far View Site ruins located about two miles from the Far View Terrace and Far View Lodge and wander around several excavated sites including Far View House, Pipe Shrine House, and Far View Reservoir, all linked by a trail system within short walking distance of each other. You might even spot the spiral-etched brick embedded in the rear wall of Pipe Shrine House.

Spending the day exploring the park’s historic ruins will have worked up an appetite, so why not enjoy dinner in the Metate Dining Room at Far View Lodge, the only in-park brick-and-mortar lodging. Perhaps you might spend the night in one of the lodge’s Kiva Deluxe rooms, with balconies offering unobstructed views of the Mesa Verde landscape. Or, if you feel like pitching a tent beneath the starry sky, the park’s Morefield Campground offers 267 sites for tents and RVs.

Speaking of starry skies, Mesa Verde National Park was certified in 2021 as the world’s 100^th International Dark Sky Park. So, make it a point to stay up past your bedtime and lift your eyes to the inky night sky studded with sparkling stars and painted by a swath of the Milky Way.

Mesa Verde National Park is open daily, year-round, except for major holidays. So, even during the height of a cold, snowy winter, you’ll still be able to explore much of the park with your snowshoes or cross-country skis. Bear in mind, depending upon the time of year you visit, the change in seasons might modify hours or even close some facilities and services.

Traveler's Choice For: History, photography, archaeology, anthropology.