Ask yourself why people would live out here compared to the relative safety and protection of the cliff dwellings. This sprawling national monument in the shadow of Mesa Verde is quite the opposite, small pueblos and isolated towers scattered over 176,000 acres of windswept desert and parched canyons. Scott Rappold, Special to The Denver Post) Canyons of the Ancients National Monument All must be respected and left untouched. Thousands of archaeological sites have been recorded in the monument, and thousands more await documentation and study. Scott Rappold, Special to The Denver PostThe ruins of a structure at Canyons of the Ancients National Monument.

They also can be reserved in advance at .įees: $30 per vehicle, valid for 7 days (available online, too) annual pass, $55 America the Beautiful annual parks pass, $80 $8-$25 per person for cliff dwelling tours (ages 2 and younger, $1). When you go: Stop at the visitors center at the park entrance and make your tour reservations, as most of the ruins can only be visited on ranger-led walks. The drive up is dizzyingly steep, and you’ll marvel at the effort it must have taken to build such marvels. It has the largest and best-preserved ruins, built on cliffsides and in massive caves known as alcoves, protected from the elements and in some cases meticulously restored by the National Park Service. This national park is the most famous of the ancient sites in the area and for good reason. (Joe Amon/The Denver Post) Mesa Verde National Park Joe Amon, The Denver PostSun Point Pueblo, carved into cliffs in southwest Colorado, can be seen at Mesa Verde National Park. How did they survive such a harsh desert landscape? Where did water and lumber come from? And why did they abandon such places after so much hard work? (There are many theories on the latter, from wars to climate change.) To walk quietly through these settlements, listening to the wind whistle through the rooms, hallways and kivas (round ceremonial chambers) is to step back in time. Though a long drive from the Front Range, visiting these ancient ruins should be on every Coloradan’s bucket list. Just think: Will your house still be standing in 1,000 years? The civilization vanished in the late 1200s but many of their homes remain, a lasting testament to the ingenuity of this mysterious people. They lived in the deserts of the Southwest and unlike the mostly nomadic peoples of the time, built houses and cities, palaces and towers, with only crude instruments and mud. Long before Colorado was occupied by white settlers, Spanish emigres or the Utes, and hundreds of years before Columbus sailed the ocean blue, the Four Corners region was home to an Indigenous people who left their mark on the landscape: the Ancestral Puebloans. Wednesday, September 7th 2022 Home Page Close Menu

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