travel dates: June 2022
An important thing I learned at Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado is that I would make a terrible cliff dweller. For one thing there’s the ancestral Pueblo peoples’ fondness for ladders, and I’ve made my trepidation about ladders clear on here before. Then there’s the crawling through tight, enclosed spaces. And then just the whole houses clinging to the side of a cliff thing.
But! Even though I’m glad I don’t have to live in them, cliff dwellings are really, really cool, and we’re lucky to have a site that preserves some amazing examples of them and lets us see them close up.
We visited Mesa Verde as a day trip from Durango (an easy 40 minute drive away), but there are campground options both close to the park and inside the park itself (with a few full hook up sites). This is probably what I’d recommend if you’re only going to visit the park one day; doing the drive more than once would have been a bit of a hassle. But, important to note, no matter where you’re staying, you’ll be doing a lot of driving inside the park, on hilly, winding roads, to get to the various sites.
We had a bit of drama as we were planning our visit, because I realized the day before we were going that Mesa Verde has a weight and length limit on the road to Wetherill Mesa. And, owing to construction within the park while we were there, the road to Wetherill Mesa was pretty much the only option available to us. I had known the road wasn’t suitable for larger RVs, but it didn’t occur to us that we’d run into any issues with our full size van. But the GWV rating is 8000 pounds, and our van is more than that by a bit. We went back and forth about what to do, but 1. we didn’t want to get all the way there and not be allowed on the road and 2. it seemed like perhaps a bad idea to ignore a rule that was designed to keep us from losing our brakes on a steep road and careening over the side of a cliff.
So we rented a car. As it happened, no one was checking anyone’s weight at the park and we saw several RVs that were clearly not in compliance with the rule. And I’m sure our brakes would have held out fine. But, again, I’m very better safe than sorry-minded when it comes to driving off cliffs.
Before I get started telling you about our summer 2022 visit to Mesa Verde, I should warn you that there seems to be an awful lot of construction an awful lot of the time in the park, and you might well not be able to see the same things we did (but you’ll be able to see things we couldn’t!). For example, I just checked, and the entire Wetherill Mesa area of the park will be closed for all of the 2023 season and possibly into 2024 (I’d guess that means definitely into 2024, but we’ll see). When we were there, the Chapin Mesa area, the most popular area of the park and home to its most famous cliff dwelling, Cliff Palace, was closed due to road construction. But there are going to be some similarities no matter what tour you go on.
We decided on the Long House tour for our visit. The NPS website tells you that, “The Long House tour is strenuous due to the heat, elevation and steepness of the trail. The tour is not recommended for anyone with heart or respiratory problems”…which was enough to make Dave’s parents hesitant about trying it; they opted for the self-guided (and no reservations needed) Step House instead. In retrospect, I think they probably would have been fine. The trail to and from Long House is steep, with a lot of steps, but it’s short and not especially difficult. Within the house there are 2 short ladders to climb. I think the warnings are mostly there because of the elevation and potential for high temperatures, but the effects of the elevation were mitigated for us since we’d already spent a week in Santa Fe acclimating. At any rate, I think the Long House tour would be appropriate for most people of any age (including young kids) without significant mobility challenges. We needed to book in advance and to make sure we were on the site as soon as tickets went on sale in order to get them for our group, but I think that it was harder than usual when we went because so much of the park was closed so there weren’t as many tours to choose from as usual. But do be aware that you’ll need a reservation for the ranger led tours and that they can sell out in advance.
Let me pause here to address a question I had before our visit: is Mesa Verde a good place for people with a fear of heights? And my answer is…probably? It depends on just how afraid of heights you are. I was totally fine on the actual tour; there are some drop offs beside the trail, but nothing that freaked me out too much (I think largely because there was always one side with a rock wall; it’s drop offs on BOTH sides that really get me). The ladders inside Long House were not bad at all (and you climb down via a set of stairs). The drive through the park, particularly when you get to the steeper part as you approach Wetherill Mesa, was not my favorite. I would not have wanted to drive it myself, but I managed okay as a passenger. It’s a long stretch of fairly scary (to the height-averse anyway) road, though. I knew that there were certain tours I would not want to do (Balcony House, mostly), but I was fine on ours and, from what I’ve read, I would have been good with Cliff Palace, too. And Mesa Verde is definitely worth pushing past one’s fears to see. That said, Abe, our then nine year old, had a really tough time with the heights, which meant all of us had a really tough time. He gets himself worked up sometimes (and other times is completely fine). So it is something to keep in mind.
Our first stop was the visitor center right inside the park entrance. This is one of the only places you can really go without getting into the aforementioned long and winding drives. There’s a gift shop and museum here, and you can pick up a junior ranger book.
This statue is pretty great, but it definitely encapsulates why I would make a terrible cliff dweller. Yikes!
I will pause here to note that Amy and I had put a lot of thought into thinking through the timing of this day, but we still found ourselves more rushed than we wanted to be trying to get to our tour on time. We had planned to stop at a picnic area midway through the drive, but, when we did the math, we opted instead to drive all the way to Wetherill Mesa and have a quick lunch at the picnic shelter there before our tour. Everything is very far apart at Mesa Verde!
The terrifying drive to Mesa Verde is also lovely. And long. Have I mentioned long? But we made it and had our quick lunch and then headed down the trail to meet up with a ranger for our tour. It’s a bit of a hike (3/4 mile) just to make it to the meet up point so make sure to leave plenty of time for that. The landscape is shaped by recent wildfires (there was some impressive statistic that I can’t remember precisely about the percentage of the park that has burned over the past however many hundreds of years. Fires are very common).
Once we reached the trailhead, the ranger gave us more warnings about the strenuousness of the hike, with a particular emphasis on the dangers of falling on the stairs to leave the site. Again, we were fine. It was nice to know that the steps are kind of wonky and uneven, but with that information in our heads no one in our group had any trouble with them. The Long Hour had three different rangers stationed at different places sharing information with us (and available for questions). The ranger at the trailhead gave us an introduction and overview of the site before sending us down.
The first glimpse of Long House is really breathtaking:
It’s one of those places we all have a picture of in our heads, but seeing it right there in real life is amazing.
The first thing to do is to conquer those ladders. But we were told there’s another way to go if you’re iffy on ladders (I imagine it’s just that they let you go up the steps).
After that we walked through the site, with two stops for rangers to tell us more about what we were seeing.
When we were there the groups were coming one after another, so there wasn’t a ton of time to linger, and it felt a little crowded.
So then all that was left was the hilly walk back up to the trailhead and then back to the Wetherill Mesa parking lot and the long hilly drive back down the mesa. With a stopover for a Junior Ranger badge:
And the drive back to Durango.
Is one day enough for Mesa Verde? With as much of the park closed as while we were there, I think so, although I wish we’d gotten an earlier start so we could have seen more/gone slower (between the rental car and the dogs back at the Airbnb, we didn’t have a ton of choice, though). If the whole park had been open, I’d have loved one more day to do another tour.
Next up: onward to Utah!
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