An ancient people's final legacy

9/16:

It was pretty chilly last night! Good thing that I have a ginormous blanket to pile on top of my sleeping bag during cold nights. It was pretty hard to leave the warmth of my tent this morning, but I had things to see!

First was the 11AM tour of Cliff Palace. The park is really long and skinny and the campground is in the north side and the cool stuff is way on the south border, so it takes a while to get there. More miles for Jane! We are getting very close to 10,000 miles elapsed since the start of the trip.

Anyways, like I mentioned in the previous post, you can't access Cliff Palace unless you're on a ranger-guided tour. So that was how I found myself in a group of 50 people traipsing down a very long flight of stairs from the top of the mesa down to the cliff dwellings. Definitely too large of a group for me, but oh well. Cliff Palace itself was really amazing - a veritable cliff dwelling city built into a giant natural sandstone alcove!

Imagine what this place would have been like when it was still thriving. People everywhere I'm sure!

The palace contained a variety of structures, the most notable of them being the kivas. Kivas are round underground rooms that were used primarily for ceremonial and religious purposes, though they did apparently also see some use as warm winter rooms and as family rooms. Cliff Palace has nine kivas, which indicates that nine family groups inhabited the city. 

I wonder if anyone has ever fallen into one of these while texting? Because I almost saw it happen on my tour

The dwellings also contained a lot of multistory buildings with rooms for living in, kitchens, and storage rooms. The Ancient Puebloans who lived here had to shape each sandstone block by hand using a nothing but a harder rock to cut it. There were some spots in the palace where the masonry was really excellent, and other places where it looked like someone just really needed a wall fast and cheap.

I wish we could have gone through the rooms and stuff, but Cliff Palace is apparently very fragile and sees so much tourist traffic that it would collapse very quickly if people were allowed back there. So, I was glad to see what I could see of it. It's very humbling to walk where people once lived and worked and played hundreds and hundreds of years ago, and to think about how much different and how much more difficult their lives must have been than mine.

It's hard to imagine how much time and effort it must have taken to build this thing right into the side of the mesa - it's very steep on the way down, and very steep on the way up. The native people used hand- and toe-holds to climb up and down the side of the mesa every day. They must have been really good free climbers! And to think, now we complain if we have to go to the far end of Home Depot to get our homebuilding supplies...

After the tour ended, I headed off to Spruce Tree House, one of the best preserved cliff dwellings in Mesa Verde. It's accessible by anyone - no tour guide required - for which I was thankful! It was a nice hike down into the valley and then back up the side a ways again to get to it. The cool thing about Spruce Tree House is the intact kiva (I believe reconstructed in the place of the original) that you can go down into! The way kivas were built, the whole room was underground with the ceiling being made of tree trunks and backfill to make it flush with ground level. A square hole in the center of the room, directly above a small fire, serves as both a chimney and gateway via ladder. There's a separate ventilation tunnel that keeps smoke from building up, alcoves for idols and other items of significance, and a hole in the ground called a sipapu that represents the entrance to Mother Earth.

Ladder sticking out of the entrance to the kiva

Inside the kiva! Hard to take a picture because it was too small to really get everything in one shot

It was cool to actually be able to go inside one of these things, because up until that point I had only seen the ruins of them. They're really interesting structures - it would be awesome to chat with one of the people from the past to see if their usage of the kiva was indeed what archaeologists have theorized it to be.

After I was tired of looking at ancient masonry, I headed down a nearby trail to instead view some ancient graffiti! The Petroglyph Trail, as it's conveniently named, is a lot of fun to hike as it's kind of like a deer trail. It's not some big wide path with all the trees and rocks cleared out of it. There's some spots where you go between a gap in two rocks and you had better be skinny enough or you're not getting through without a fight! And halfway along the trail back up to the top of the mesa is an amazing series of petroglyphs.

According to some current Hopi translators, these petroglyphs tell the story of the divergence of tribes as they migrated

The hands are my favorrite

I spent a little while there reading over the translation of the petroglyphs, then headed on back up to the top of the mesa. Jane and I went back north and stopped at the cafe near the lodge, at which point in time it promptly started raining. I took the opportunity to catch up on some blog posts; Jane took the opportunity to have a much-needed bath.

I have to say that I'm a little torn, at this point. Tomorrow is my last day of adventuring; the day after that, I will return home to domesticity. Part of me is really glad to be going home, to have a permanent room and a bed and a routine. But most of me really, really just wants to keep going. There's so much of this country that I still haven't seen and I know now that it's all just waiting for me. And with Jane with me and enough cash to get by, I can do anything, go anywhere. But alas, I have to return home - and truthfully Jane needs quite a bit of maintenance. Nothing terribly involved, but leaks are cropping up by the handful as dried out seals (that were last replaced in the 90's, if not earlier) are finally giving way. I want to make sure she stays in top form so I really need to get on top of that before it turns into an actual problem.

So, I'm going to make tomorrow a great day (like that's a hard thing to accomplish) and after that we'll call it quits and head home. For now, Kelly signing out!