Mesa Verde, southern Colorado

Mesa Verde Spanish for ‘green table', is a national park which houses, preserves and displays pueblo dwellings which fill cliff-rock alcoves that rise 2,000ft above Montezuma Valley is southern Colorado.  

As well as the dwellings, the terrain of the park is stunningly beautiful with high cliffs long which it is hair-raising to drive.  The drive within the park is some 30-35 miles from one end to the other.  The campground is a nice one with hot showers and laundry facilities.  Deer graze in the grass next to your RV as you camp.

Remarkably preserved, these cliff dwellings cluster in canyons that slice the mesa into narrow tablelands.  Archaeologists have located more than 4,800 sites including 600 dwellings dating from about AD 550 to 1300.  The dwellings document changes in the lives of prehistoric people once called the Anasazi.  Now days they are more accurately called ancestral Puebloans.

Close up of the cliff face with the houses built in the crevices.