Original Artwork

Original Ancestral Puebloan Painting

While this isn't a truly amazing image from a photographic stand point, I just had to share it because I think it's a truly amazing subject. If you look back to the first image I posted of Cliff Palace, you'll notice some legs sticking out of the first floor doorway of the square tower on the right side of the village. That person was looking up at these original paintings on what would have been the third of fourth floor of the tower.

I don't know exactly when this room was painted, but Cliff Palace was last occupied in 1260 A.D., some 750 years ago. As amazing as it is that the paint survived, I find it more fascinating that people nearly 800 years ago enjoyed painting the walls of their homes same as we do today. Here's another view of the same room.

The wood beams you see criss crossing both images served to stabilize the walls of the tower and also acted as floor joists for the different levels.

Please Note: The National Park Service has decided that people should be allowed to look up in this tower and have done the required work to ensure it is safe. When exploring more remote, less controlled ruins don't attempt to crawl in them. If the structure hasn't been properly inspected and stabilized it could very easily collapse without notice. Also, repeated contact with the walls of the ruins has a noticeable impact of the stone. Take a look at this image. The oils in people's hands has built up and attracted dirt over the years causing staining around the doorway. The park service has deemed this acceptable in this case, but that's a decision best left up to the experts.

The Purpose of Cliff Palace Design

A stitched panorama image from "inside" the Cliff Palace ruins

I use Google Analytics to track visits to my website and where/how those visitors found my site. When someone finds my site through Google or another search engine, I can even see what terms they entered into the search to find my site. I noticed an interesting one this morning. "Purpose of Cliff Palace design" Go ahead, try that in Google, the top 3 results are all my site. Unfortunately, I don't think any of those links really offer the information that was being looked for. So without further adieu, my attempt to fix that.

When I first visited Mesa Verde 25 years ago, the working theory was that the Ancestral Puebloans moved into their cliff dwellings for defensive reasons. While more current research shows that theory was wrong, it's easy to see why it came about. These dwellings would have been easier to defend than the mesa top pueblos and the nearby Sand Canyon Pueblo was the scene of a gruesome battle for resources. As drought gripped the southwest in the 1200s, there is increasing evidence of war between neighboring villages.

All good reasons why it would be easy to claim the Ancestral Puebloans moved into cliff dwellings for protection. The problem with the theory is that there is no extensive evidence of violence or warfare in Mesa Verde. So why then did the people move to these cliff dwellings which would be considerably more difficult for themselves to access?

The most likely explanation is again a result of the drought, not violence that resulted because of it but simply because of the lack of water. These alcoves in the cliffs were carved over the eons by water seeping down through the soft sandstone, slowly carving out cracks and crevices and ultimately breaking off larger chunks of the rock. This water seepage created natural springs at the back of the alcoves. Even today these springs are still active and visible in a majority of the alcoves (the most easily accessible of these to modern visitors is the spring near Spruce Tree House). The springs provided a great, clean water supply for the village but the cliff dwellings provided an even greater advantage.

As the Ancestral Puebloan population grew, more and more arable land was required to feed each village. Add to that lower crop yields due to the drought and the need for fertile farmland grew exponentially. By moving the village into these alcoves that weren't able to support crops anyway, the people were able to maximize their mesa top farmland. This farmland would have been difficult to reach, especially considering that their "ladders" were nothing more than a series of crude hand and foot holds on the side of the cliff, but compared to alternative of not having enough food for the village, that would have been an easy trade off.

To whoever was searching for information this morning, if you're still looking, I hope that helps. If it falls short of what you were hoping for, you can find much more information on the impact of the drought on the Ancestral Puebloan peoples, I reccomend (insert shameless plug here) the book my dad and I published a little over a year ago, The Ancestral Puebloan Primer.

Cliff Palace Ruins

The ruins of Cliff Palace

And we're back to photos from my visit to Mesa Verde after a quick break with my last post.

I'm not sure what all of these room were in the time of the Ancestral Puebloans, I'm sure there's an archaeological survey out there detailing what was found in each room and their probable uses, but I don't have access to it so I won't speculate too much. What I can say is that it is very likely the room(s) in the upper left of the ruin were most probably living space. Above them, on the wall of the alcove, you can see the dark black stain of soot from more than the occasional fire. This heavy buildup would likely only result from repeated fires to heat a living space during cold Colorado winters.

Foggy Morning Trail

A foggy morning along the trail around Lake Hodges

Time to take a quick break from our normally scheduled Ruins photos (if you're digging them, don't fret, there are plenty more to come! If you're not, hopefully this one will get you through the home stretch of them!) to share a more recent image.

On the eve of Superbowl Sunday, I looked up the forecast for the next morning's sunrise and was excited to see what looked like perfect conditions. I charged my batteries, gathered my gear and set my alarm for 5 a.m. I made it out the door by 5:15 Sunday morning and was instantly excited by the possibilities. Not only were there a few clouds in the sky, but there was some lingering fog. I couldn't wait to get to the lake and watch the sunrise above with a low hanging fog surrounding the lake.

I got to the lake almost an hour before sunrise and found it completely shrouded. Trees just 20 feet away disappeared into the thick fog. Forget sunrise, I was just hoping I be able to see someone approaching me! (The lake is pretty secluded at that time of the morning and with the fog I felt like I was smack dab in the middle of a horror movie, so I was a little jumpy.)

I stayed in my "sunrise" spot for a while capturing some very moody, very foggy images and was about ready to head home when I saw this trail. I've walked this trail a number of times but never found it all that interesting but, since I was there and only planning on taking a nap when I got home, I decided to see if the fog made it more interesting.

As soon as I got to this spot, I knew this would be the shot of the day! Good thing I decided to check it out before heading home.

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A friend and fellow photographer had rough plans of meeting up at the lake that morning (I wasn't sure if the alarm would wake me up, so I gave him a general idea of where I would be IF I did wake up) but due to the heavy fog, Shimon wasn't sure were to find me. Instead of staying in the fog, he ventured up the hill behind me and took this photo of the sunrise above the fog. I'm somewhere near the bottom left hand corner of his image, but it's a little hard to see me with all the fog. I would say it was a very successful day for both of us!

Built In

The structures conform to the boulders in the alcove.

This is one of the first areas of Cliff Palace where you can get up close and personal with the ruins. The ranger guiding my tour group had stopped and was giving the group a brief introduction and overview of Cliff Palace and the Ancestral Puebloans in general. His talk was informative, but knowing everything he was talking about, I slipped to the edge of the group and used the time to capture a number of images without the risk of any bystanders wandering through my frame.

The Ancestral Puebloans didn't quarry their stones, they simply reshaped the rock that erosion had worked free of the cliff face and without the proper tools to quarry and shape large rocks, they often had to build around the contours of the alcove they wanted to call home. What struck me in this image was the way the buildings incorporated the large boulders and worked around them. Frank Lloyd Wright would have been proud!

Mesa Verde | Cliff Palace

Cliff Palace Panorama

Mesa Verde has a very special place in my heart. I first visited the park along side my dad when I was six and it was here that I first fell in love with the ruins left behind by the Ancestral Puebloans. That fascination has grown into countless return trips to the Four Corners area and even a couple books co-authored with my dad. Despite the numerous trips to the area, I hadn't returned to Mesa Verde until this past October, nearly 25 years later. I have to admit, when planning my return trip, I was worried that my childhood memories would have become over exaggerated and park wouldn't live up to my expectations.

I'm happy to report that those concerns were quickly alleviated. Mesa Verde was just as incredible, if not more so, as I remembered. The park protects nearly 600 individual cliff dwellings, the largest of which is Cliff Palace, also believed to be the largest cliff dwelling in North America. This city in a cliff is composed of over 150 identified rooms and 23 kivas.

The ruins are accessible only on Ranger guided tours, but for $3/person, the one hour tours are an absolute bargain. The park service advertises the tour as "strenuous" but don't be scared away, the tour was a breeze, even after hiking the entire day before.

This panorama image was taken while I was waiting for the Ranger to start my tour. I removed most of the people from the previous tour group from the image, but left a few on the right side to provide a sense of scale and show just how enormous Cliff Palace is. I wish I could have gotten down there on my own and spent as much time as I wanted shooting among the ruins, but I took full advantage of the time I had down there (and I think I went over my 1 hour limit, but the Ranger was nice and didn't push too hard to get me to leave) so I have plenty of images to share in the coming days.

Humble Beginnings

Remains of a Pit House

Remains of a mesa top pueblo.

If you've heard of Mesa Verde National Monument, you no doubt think of amazing Cliff Dwellings built into natural alcoves that dot the canyon walls in the park. These iconic cliff dwellings are indeed the main draw for Mesa Verde, however the people who actually lived here had much more humble beginnings. Occupation in the area predates the cliff dwellings by centuries. In fact, the cliff dwellings that Mesa Verde is so famous for represent only a brief sliver at the end of the pueblo culture's timeline in the area.

Along with representing only a brief time span, the cliff dwellings represent only a fraction of the archeological sites found within the park's borders. Of the close to 5,000 archeological sites, only about 600 are cliff dwellings and many of those are far less impressive than the park's best known dwelling, Cliff Palace.

Long before the Ancestral Puebloans moved into the cliff dwellings, they occupied mesa top adobe villages and before those pueblos, the people built and lived in pit houses. The top image here is a 4 or 5 image panorama showing the remains of one of these pit houses. They weren't much more than a shallow depression in the ground that would be covered by a roof of logs and wood. These early homes, while unassuming, would leave their mark on Puebloan culture and modern.

Small, one room adobe structures began to replace the pit house as a primary residence and would eventually grow into multi-room pueblos, or villages. The second image shows the remains of a small, 2 or 3 room pueblo. (Actually it shows the remains of 2 such villages, but the second village is far in the background, near the back wall of the modern, protecting structure and is barely visible.) The structure in the immediate foreground isn't a pit house, it's what the pit house grew into, a kiva. Kivas became an integral part of Ancestral Puebloan culture and are still used by the descendants of the Ancestral Puebloans, namely the Hopi. Today, kivas are used mostly as ceremonial spaces, but in ancient times they were more utilitarian places, serving as living areas as well as ceremonial and sometimes just for storage.

The kiva, at least in my mind, is a trademark feature of the Ancestral Puebloans. While I'm not a scholar, I have read quite a bit about the culture and have never heard of an Ancestral Puebloan village without a kiva and most villages had quite a few kivas. And that's not counting Great Kivas such as those found in Chaco Canyon or Aztec Ruins, but that's a story for another day!