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.

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!

Walls of Escalante Pueblo

Walls

This image was taken from the other side of the pueblo, looking back in the direction I took the image in my last post from. The light that day was perfect. The large fluffy clouds not only added some interest to the sky but also filtered the sun light just right to really make all the details in this image pop. The details and the relationship between the walls and overgrown grasses and shrubs was my main focus for this image so even though the colors popped quite nicely in the perfect light as well, I converted this one to black and white. That way, the colors couldn't dominate the details.

And that's it from Escalante Pueblo and the Anasazi Heritage Center. I'm currently working on finishing the processing on my Mesa Verde photos and can't wait to start sharing them!

OK, one more image from Escalante Pueblo:

A 2 row, many-many image panoramic of Escalante Pueblo

Escalante Pueblo Vertical Panorama

The remains of Escalante Pueblo overlook the surrounding area.

This four frame panorama of Escalante Pueblo helps show what made this hill top location a perfect location for a village. The hill itself isn't large enough to be self contained (no arable land or water source) but both are readily available nearby. The reservoir visible in the distance (upper left, just below the horizon) is a modern construction, however it would not have been built where there wasn't already a sizable water source. If you look closely, there are modern buildings in the distance (to the right of the reservoir). Many of these are farms and ranches, indicating good arable land.

Additionally, many scholars theorize that the downfall of the Ancestral Puebloan civilization was accompanied with violent warfare between neighbors fighting over dwindling resources in a drought. A hill top location would have made it much easier to defend and detect incoming threats.

And let's not discount the view. It's easy to imagine that even eight hundred years ago, people would have appreciated a view as amazing as this one.

Anasazi Heritage Center & the Escalante Pueblo

Time to move on from my Sand Canyon Trail images. There's still plenty more to see in the gallery, and it's not that the rest aren't worth a write up, it's just that I want to move on to other parts from my Colorado trip, so be sure to check out the gallery for other Sand Canyon images.

---

Layers

My hike along Sand Canyon Trail didn't take as long as I had planned for, so rather than sitting around, I drove up the road a little ways to the Anasazi Heritage Center (that's a link to their site, click here for my image of the center) in nearby Dolores, Colorado. If you're ever in the area, and have an interest in the Ancestral Puebloans, stop by this museum. It only takes a $3 donation to get in, is one of the best museums for the Ancestral Puebloans around and has a couple small pueblo ruins on the grounds.

The smaller of the two pueblos, Dominguez Pueblo, sits right out front of the museum but isn't extraordinarily interesting on its own. I'm not sure I even took a photo of it. If I did, it wasn't interesting enough when I reviewed it at home to save it from the trash bin. Escalante Pueblo on the other hand, is a bit more interesting. A half mile trail of switchbacks leads from the Anasazi Heritage Center uphill to Escalante Pueblo and offers 360 degree views of the surrounding area, but I'll get into that more with the next image.

This image has been my desktop background at work for a while now. There's just something pleasing to me about it. The more I look at it, the more I enjoy the layers within it, the scrub bush in the foreground, the v-shape of the walls, curve of the hill and the brilliant blue cloud filled sky. Definitely a favorite from the trip (I'm pretty picky about my desktop backgrounds, so the fact that this one has lasted so long is proof that I like it)!

Sand Canyon Trail | Saddlehorn Hamlet in Color

A close up and panoramic view of Saddlehorn Pueblo

Another panoramic image of Saddlehorn Pueblo. This time I got up close and took 6 images horizontally then stitched them together in Photoshop. There's some noticeable distortion from being so close to the structure when taking this image but I like it anyway! The walls were a bit straighter in person than they appear here, but I like the feeling that they're coming out to meet you.

Sand Canyon Trail | Saddlehorn Hamlet B&W

Saddlehorn Hamlet in Black & White

This pueblo is known as Saddlehorn Hamlet and it's the next major stop along the Sand Canyon Trail after the Unnamed Ruin. As you can probably guess, the pueblo got its name from the unique rock formation above it. This area is composed mostly of sandstone, which makes for some really cool shapes in the rocks. The soft, porous nature of the sandstone in the area made these somewhat iconic alcoves possible for the Ancestral Puebloans to build their homes in.

This image started out as 6 individual frames that were "stitched" together in Photoshop and made for an enormous vertical image. However the sky and immediate foreground were largely uninteresting, so I opted to go with the square crop on it and lose those areas.

I've got a couple more images from Sand Canyon to come, then it's on to the Mesa Verde images!!!

Sand Canyon Trail | Unnamed Ruin

As the new year begins, I again have to acknowledge that I've let my blog sort of wither away. As the homepage for my site, it's just not acceptable to go nearly 2 full months without a new post. Yes, it was an extremely busy 2 months (there was a new promotion at work and an engagement to my wonderful gal, Kristen just to name a couple big things), but still. That said, I've got a few things planned for my site to make sure it doesn't keep up like this! Stay tuned for updates! In the meantime, I probably won't write quite as much about each image, not that I was particularly verbose about many, but hopefully just a few words will be easier to spit out and get the images coming faster!

---

A small unnamed ruin along Sand Canyon Trail

Considering the size of this small ruin, I took an absolute ton of photos of it. More can be seen in my Sand Canyon gallery and there are several others on my hard drive. Maybe it's because I found it so early on along the trail. I wasn't tired or overheated yet so I took my time and played around.

This sign is a good reminder to all when visiting ruins of this type, especially in a less developed, less preserved area such as Sand Canyon. These structures are 800+ years old and have withstood the elements without maintenance for much of that time. Even if you're "just going to take a quick photo" or you're "not going to touch anything," please, keep your distance. One wrong move and this structure that has survived for centuries could be gone in an instant.

Future generations thank you for your caution!

Sand Canyon Trail | Castle Rock Pueblo

A lone standing wall is all that remains of Castle Rock Pueblo.

From the Sand Canyon South Trailhead parking lot, where my little Kia was parked in this image, the trail leads you up a sloping stretch of slickrock and around a sandstone butte known as Battle Rock. That's Battle Rock in the upper right corner of the image of my car in the parking lot and it can also be seen in this image along with the BLM sign for Canyon of the Ancients. As the trail rounds Battle Rock, a spur leads you to the day's first ruins.

All that remains of this once sprawling village known as Castle Rock Pueblo is this lone standing wall. The surrounding ground is littered with cut stones that once made 40 above ground rooms, 9 towers, a D-shaped building and at least 16 kivas. At its height, between 1250 and 1280 AD, the pueblo even included rooms and structures built on the sides and top of the butte. The Crow Canyon Archeological Center in Cortez has an interesting article on the oral history of Castle Rock Pueblo, along with a series of photographs from an 1874 survey of the pueblo showing the remains of structures on the butte. See Figure 1 and Figure 2 to see the additional ruins. Figure 3 and Figure 4 are also interesting but don't show additional ruins.

Also, the first 3 images in the Traces of the Ancient World: Details gallery are close up views of the Ancestral Pueblo stonework from this last remaining part of Castle Rock Pueblo.

Off Roading: Kia Style

My Kia Spectra at the Sand Canyon South trail head.

Following breakfast and a quick photo walk around the property on my first morning at Kelly Place, I hopped into my car and made my way over to the Sand Canyon South trail head for a morning of hiking.

The trail head is less than a mile up the road from Kelly Place and so close that I drove right past it as I wasn't expecting it so soon. In fact, I was looking at some interesting butte formations on the opposite side of the road, wondering if there we ruins over there as well. It appeared to be private land on that side of the road, but in all honesty, it would be somewhat hard to believe that there wasn't something ancient over there. The whole Four Corners area is so loaded with Ancestral Puebloan ruins (as well as those from other cultures) that I've heard "you can't throw a stone in any direction without hitting something." Often times it may be a small relatively uninteresting structure, but they are everywhere!

After a slight detour up the road and back, I arrived at the Sand Canyon trail head and while this photo insinuates a rough ride in, this parking area is right off the main road. At most, my little Kia only had to survive about 20 feet of driving on solid bedrock to arrive at this location.

The Sand Canyon Trail is part of Canyon of the Ancients National Monument, one of the country's newest National Parks, which was designated to preserve and protect the highest concentration of archaeological sites in the United States. Over 6,000 distinct structures have been identified within the 164,000 acres of the monument and Sand Canyon contains a number of well preserved cliff dwellings. Spurs in the trail take you right to the base of a handful of these dwellings and many others can be seen in alcoves on the other, inaccessible, side of the canyon.

Images of the dwellings to come shortly...

Sue's Ruin in the Morning Light

Sue's Ruin in the morning light.

Here's another view of the reconstructed pueblo, known as Sue's Ruin, on the Kelly Place property. Sue's Ruin is just one of the many remnants of the Ancestral Puebloans that can be found on a quick walk around the main lodge.

The pueblo, named after the property's original owner's wife, was in use between about 980 and 1225 AD and spans two distinct construction styles, Pueblo II and Pueblo III. The Kellys first excavated this 13 room pueblo and its kiva in the 1960s but back filled it once they were done to prevent further deterioration of the fragile walls. The pueblo and kiva were again excavated in 1988 and stabilized with the help of trained archaeologists.

While this image makes the pueblo look rather small, it's a trick of perspective. From this angle, the back side of the pueblo, only the very top of the reconstructed walls stick out above the tall grasses along the ridge of a hill. The pueblo, and its kiva, is actually large enough to house several families.

Sue's Ruin provided an excellent subject for me while I stayed at Kelly Place. It's accessible (only a couple hundred feet from the main lodge), photogenic and just plain interesting. I've got a number of interesting images to share just of this small part of my trip, and many of the others show the pueblo's true size much better, but next up is Sand Canyon Trail. If I don't keep these posts at least somewhat in chronological order, it's going to quickly turn into a mess of confusion for me.

Granary & Kelly Place

Ancestral Puebloan Granary on the Kelly Place property.

---

Disclaimer: In the interest of honesty and openness, I have to say that the good folks at Kelly Place offered me a 2 night stay in exchange for using some of the information found on my Dad's website. That being said, if I hadn't enjoyed the stay, I would only mention "I stayed here" and that's it. But Marc and Jerene really have a great place set up there just outside of Cortez, especially for visitors interested in the Ancestral Puebloan culture that dominated the Four Corners region hundreds of years ago. 

---

OK now that that's out of the way, I recently had a chance to make a return visit to Cortez, Co. This visit was roughly my second and half visit to the Cortez area and it was a wonderful trip. My first visit came around the time when I was six as I accompanied my dad on his move from Syracuse, NY to Los Angeles, Calif. Being the smart guy that he is, Dad knew he couldn't keep a growing 6 year old cooped up in the car for a full 5 days of hard driving so he planned numerous stops for us. One of those stops was Mesa Verde National Park. It was that stop that really entranced both of us in the culture from hundreds of years ago that left reminders of their presence scattered across the landscape. This visit ultimately led dozens upon dozens of follow up visits to the Four Corners area, 3 books (2 as co-authors), my dad's website (anasaziadventure.com) and Dad eventually moving to the area to lead tours around many of the National Parks and Monuments in the area. In other words, it was a rather significant point in both our lives.

Despite numerous trips with Dad back to the Southwest, I didn't manage another visit to Cortez until about 5 years ago and even then, it was only about a half day visit. That's where the "half" of "...my second and half visit..." comes from. When I was moving from Buffalo to San Diego, Dad was living in Cortez and working on his initial book about the region's ancient culture. The quick visit and short timeline to get to San Diego didn't allow for a trip up the road to Mesa Verde even though it was tantalizingly close.

In late spring of this year, Dad was contacted by the folks at Kelly Place requesting the use of his Sand Canyon Trail Guide, which remained unfinished after a hard drive crash a couple years ago. Marc offered Dad a couple nights stay at Kelly Place to help him get the guide finished up. I got to be the lucky beneficiary of Dad moving overseas not long ago and jumped at the chance. I even booked an extra night in one of the campsites Kelly Place offers on their property. Since the drive from San Diego to Cortez takes about 13 hours, the extra night was really worth it. It gave me a chance to spend a day hiking and photographing along the Sand Canyon Trail and a full day to visit Mesa Verde again, 25 years after I first fell in love with the park.


I've never stayed in a Bed & Breakfast before (I was just never high class enough until recently), but if Kelly Place is an indication for how they all are, I can't wait to stay in more! Good breakfasts, nice room to stay in and friendly folks to chat with when I wasn't out with the camera. What more could you want? PLUS, on their property, there's a reconstructed pueblo, the granary high on the cliff wall as seen in the photos that accompany this post, ruins of another pueblo under excavation, a trail that runs through the property to over 25 documented historic culture site and allows easy access to Sand Canyon in Canyon of the Ancients National Monument. In other words, if you're looking for a great and unique place to stay in the Four Corners area, I highly recommend Kelly Place!

A closer look at the ruins of the granary.

Granaries like this one are pretty common throughout the Southwest. They provided a safe place to store a pueblo's harvest for the winter ahead without worrying about rodents and other animals getting fat off the villagers' hard work. Take a look at the image above, just below the modern buildings in the background, there's a corner of a reconstructed pueblo sticking up through the grass. (It's difficult to see at the size image I have here in the blog, but as always you can click the image to see a larger version of the image where it'll be easier to see.) I've got plenty more images of this pueblo, known as Sue's Ruin, to share but I'll get to those in good time. It is likely that the granary shown on the cliff face in these images was built by the same folks who built Sue's Ruin and utilized it as their pantry.

I've got a ton more to come from this trip, so stay tuned!



America's Southwestern Treasures

America's Southwestern Treasures' Front Cover

I'm happy to announce that the second book from my dad and I, America's Southwestern Treasures, is now available to purchase!

As a follow up to our original publication, The Ancestral Puebloan Primer, Treasures is your concise guide to America's Southwest and the remnants of number of distinct ancient cultures who resided there, not just the Ancestral Puebloans. More than 170 archeological sites and 13 museums are covered and the 130 plus pages of Treasures detail which culture built the site, what is important about it and what you can expect to find there on your visit, both in terms of modern services and ancient ruins or artwork.

Additionally, each site is rated on a scale of 0 to 3 so you can spend your limited vacation time at one of the 30 "must see" sites instead of a site with only scholarly interest.

Our six Suggested Itineraries mean you can make the most of a quickly planned trip and the indexes (sorted by geographic location and cultures) help plan an impromptu visit to nearby sites of interest.

You can  purchase the book direct from our publisher, Createspace, right here.