Mesa Verde - Cliff Palace

My next stop at Mesa Verde National Park was the famous Cliff Palace, the most famous feature of the park and the largest cliff dwelling in North America.



My Cliff Palace tour also featured the most fun guide of any National Park experience I've had so far. This is Joey. Joey is a park ranger, who should be an actress, or possibly a stand-up comic. She brought to life stories about the Ancestral Puebloans, the archaeologists who study them and the tourists who visit them with a keen eye and a wicked sense of humour. I particularly liked her impression above of a teenage girl dragged to the park by her "totally lame" parents. I also liked her instruction that we must drink plenty of water throughout the tour because it involves vigorous climbing at high altitude and if we faint, then she will have to toss us over the cliff because "The tour can't stop and she isn't going to carry us out."



Despite her humorous delivery, Joey was serious about her history and gave us a wonderful overview of the history of Cliff Palace and what little we actually know about the Ancestral Puebloans who built it, lived in it for a few generations and then mysteriously abandoned it. The little snippets of everyday information are the things I always remember. For example, Joey showed us a mano and metate, two rocks used to grind grain into rough flour. She explained, in her entertaining and roundabout way, that because the mano and metate were both made of sandstone, they both shed small amounts of sand into the food of the Ancestral Puebloans. Over a lifetime (which was only an average of 28 years) this sand ground down their teeth severely. By the time an Ancestral Puebloan was in his or her twenties, virtually nothing remained of their molars and malnutrition contributed to an early death.



The first thing you notice when you visit Cliff Palace is just how big it is. Then your guide tells you that it was home to somewhere between 100 and 120 people, or possibly even more. You do a quick head count on your tour group (31 people) and realise that Cliff Palace was really pretty small. The people who lived here were farmers who stored most of their harvest to get them through the winter. Many of the rooms, particularly the tiny ones way up in the crack in the rock ceiling of the alcove, were used exclusively for food storage.



This is the interior of one of the square towers, which was decorated inside with abstract designs painted onto the walls. A small section of the original artwork remains, but what you see here is maintained by the rangers for the edification of visitors who can at least see a little of what it might have been like long ago.

Cliff Palace was (re)discovered by two cowboys in 1888 and gradually damaged and looted by tourists and curio hunters. Eventually, to protect, preserve and study the remaining historical evidence at this site, Mesa Verde was declared a National Park. Now the only way to see the cliff dwellings is in the company of a ranger guide like Joey, which is no bad thing.