Last stop in Colorado.

Mesa Verde National Park was our last stop in Colorado. This is a site inhabited by Native Americans for thousands of years. They built these cliff dwellings during the last 200 years or so that they lived in the area. No one knows why they moved to the cliffs, or why they abandoned them.

Part of the huge Mesa.

To get to the first cliff dwelling, we had to:

Climb this huge ladder.

Then shimmy through this small passage.

These are doors. The top door would have been reached by ladder.

The houses were built right into the cliffs.


This is a kiva, a ceremonial chamber. It would have had logs across the top forming a roof.
People got inside by climbing down a ladder in the middle of the roof.

This is an original wall painting.

At one point we squeezed through this passage.

At another we crawled through this hole.

To leave, we had to climb this ladder...

Then amble up this path!

This was another cliff dwelling site at Mesa Verde.