July 3rd - Mesa Verde: Petroglyphs, Colorado

We wanted to see some other parts of Mesa Verde including Long House on Wetherill Mesa, so after breakfast we drove up to the Visitor Center to get the tickets—tickets for all tours are $2.50 per person and that represents quite a bargain in my opinion. We asked for the 1 p.m. tour at Long House because we wanted to see Spruce Tree House and walk the trail out to the petroglyphs in Spruce Canyon in the morning while it was still relatively cool, which we figured would be better for walking.

That accomplished, we drove to the museum on Chapin Mesa, signed in for the trail, and took the paved trail down to Spruce Tree House in the apex of the canyon next to the museum. The trail goes down a hundred feet or so in a series of switchbacks to the level of Spruce Tree House, but then it is only 1/10th of a mile or so over to the cliff dwelling.

There are no tours of Spruce Tree House, but a Ranger is on hand to answer any questions and, quite probably, to protect the ruins from souvenir hunters. This protection is quite necessary—I later read that one ancient site in an adjacent valley had completely disappeared during the 20th century, presumably dismantled brick by brick and carried home by tourists. Spruce Tree House is smaller than Cliff Palace but quite nicely preserved and very pretty.

One special feature of Spruce Tree House is a kiva where the roof has been reconstructed in an original fashion by the Park Service. All the other kivas we saw were big circular holes in the ground with no roofs, but that doesn’t give you the feeling the ancient puebloans would have had of climbing down a steep ladder thru the smoke of a fire into a dark kiva. Well, at this kiva you get the experience of climbing down the ladder minus the fire and smoke part, which is probably just as well. The ladder is quite sturdy but with smoke stinging your eyes I expect some folks would have problems climbing in and out.

We both climbed down into the dim but cool interior and tried to imagine how it would have been 800 years ago. It was surprisingly snug and cozy down there, but light enough that Monika did not get claustrophobia. I snapped pictures in all directions and they show the basic structure pretty well but not, of course, the plastered wall with painted decorations that would have existed in the 1200s. One wall fragment recovered from a kiva had over 30 layers of plaster with painting on each layer, so clearly the inhabitants took great care in keeping the kiva nicely decorated for the ceremonies and other events that took place there.

From Spruce Tree House we continued on the petroglyph trail down the side of Spruce Tree Canyon. The trail is like a nature trail with numbered positions and Monika read the descriptions of each thing we saw. The trail itself was a kick—it wound over and under large boulders, and sometimes thru narrow 18-inch clefts between the rocks. The total elevation change was advertised at 100 feet, but that is quite misleading as you walk up and down a great deal on the way out to the petroglyphs. As a Volksmarch, we would have given it rating of 3 on the 1 (very easy) to 5 (very difficult) rating scale. The trail is rocky enough and has enough loose sand covering the rocks to require boots for decent footing. Regardless of all that, the trail was great because all along the way we had magnificent views down the canyon where it widened out and back up the canyon to the narrow end where the museum was located. We also were very happy to be walking this trail in the morning when it was mostly in shade. According to other folks we talked to who did it in the afternoon, the rocks heat up enough to bake you like you were in an oven and that made it quite unpleasant.

The highpoint of the trail was the set of petroglyphs, and you really ought to see those if you ever get to Mesa Verde. Very few people walk this trail—we met not a single person in the 2 hours we were on the trail—and that’s really a shame. To me, the petroglyphs are uniquely impressive because they represent the art of an 800-year-old culture and are clear enough to communicate to us today. The only problem is what exactly they mean—the brochure for the trail gave some of the modern Hopi interpretations of them that consisted largely of clan symbols, and of course everyone is free to make up their own interpretations.

The formation that we called Papa Bear, Mama Bear, and Baby Bear consisted of three figures linked by lines. I would have thought of a happy dance routine, but this formation was interpreted by the Hopi as the people being whipped into line by the kachinka (?) spirit, a decidedly more malevolent interpretation. Others, like a line with ruler-like markings along it, were not interpreted by the Hopi and remain mysterious to me. But that’s part of the fun, guessing what the petroglyphs represent and what each one meant to the culture. One symbol that seemed pretty clear-cut was the hand symbol that apparently the signature of the artist doing the petroglyph!

From the petroglyphs the trail ascended to the rim of the canyon and followed the rim back to the museum thru a juniper and pinon pine forest. This segment was far more level than the way out and took us only ½ hour compared to the 1 ½ hours going out. That said, it wasn’t nearly as much fun as the way out and had a lot less shade—the forest is rather scraggly and the shade is quite patchy. We were back in time to have an early lunch at the restaurant across the street, and this time I had the healthy sliced turkey sandwich on whole wheat bread—quite tasty and very healthy except for the side of potato chips!

We drove back to the Visitors Center and turned left to reach the other big arm of Mesa Verda, the Wetherill Mesa branch. The road is narrow and twisty in spots, so bicycles and anything over 24 feet are prohibited, but it was paved and clearly marked so I had no problem—the truck handled well. We arrived an hour early for the 1 p.m. tour, so we sat in a nice shaded patio in front of the lunch counter, drank ice water to keep cool and read the brochures about Long House until it was time to go. The tour began with a tram ride along a twisty, narrow road about a mile back to the edge of the canyon, where we all disembarked and the Ranger began his talk. The Ranger began by showing us a check dam on the top of the mesa that conserved the rainwater for the small fields of crops. Hundreds of these were constructed and they complemented the more elaborate water reservoir we had previously seen at the Far View ruins.

Long House is very interesting because the walking route took us all the way thru to the back of the cliff dwelling. Here were the seep springs that provided a reliable source of water for the ancient puebloans. They carved out hollows in the rock to collect the water and even fashioned dippers from pottery that would exactly fit these hollows. Then as now, the water was precious in this arid climate and they surely took pains that every drop could be extracted from the springs and used. We even saw carefully carved channels between the hollows so that if one filled up the overflow would go to the next hollow to be used. All this careful use of water allowed these folks to build up a population of somewhere between 20 and 50 thousand people in the 4 corners area, which is almost twice the population that live in the area today! So you have to give these people and their stone-age culture tremendous credit for a successful struggle against a very harsh environment for over 600 years. They could support more people in this environment and climate than we can with all our technology. Certainly if we visit other cultures to learn, we can also take lessons from the successful cultures of the past like these folks.

We were rather tired and hot after the Long House tour and decided not to take the walking tour of the other ruins on the top of Wetherill Mesa. The information in the brochures made it sound like a nice trail but it also duplicated many of the things we had seen during our walks on Chapin Mesa so we didn’t feel too badly about skipping it. Instead we drove back to camp early so I could work on the journal and then we could read for a while.