Mesa Verde - green table

Mesa Verde is a national park founded in 1906 to preserve the ancient dwellings of the Ancestral Pueblo or Anasazi. There are 600 cliff dwellings in the national park, only a few are open for viewing by the public, with over 4000 other archeological sites also.   Some of the dwellings have 150 rooms!  The Ancestral Pueblo also built homes and towers above the ground on the mesa  out of brick they cut from the rocks in the area which are still partially standing. They used a mortar between the rocks they made which is still there where we could see it. According to the information we got, they had a very sophisticated society and were very accomplished in the arts.  

This photo is the closest I could get to  show the rooms of  one of the cliff homes where the natives lived from 550 -1200 AD.  The cliff dwellings are built so high up off the canyon floor that I  could not figure out how they got to the ledges, climbing up or climbing down or the area was not as it is now and they were actually not that high up.  

The cliff dwellings were found by a Colorado rancher in the 1800's.   A 20 mile road goes from the park entrance to the mesas, which starts out winding around a mountain and then flattening out as we are on the top of a huge mesa where we viewed several cliff homes.

The extra is the view of this same dwelling from a location across the canyon.