John M. Setzler, Jr. Life in Black and White

Mesa Verde

SWA10-MesaVerdev3

Originally uploaded by John Setzler.

Another stop on my Southwest Adventure was Mesa Verde. Mesa Verde is located in Southern Colorado near the San Juan mountains at the southern end of the Colorado Rockies. I'm not sure what the altitude at Mesa Verde actually is because I didn't bother to take my hand-held GPS out of my backpack on this trip. A rough guess would be somewhere between 8000 and 9000 feet above sea level.

The Mesa doesn't look really large from the road approaching it. I figured when we entered the park gate, it wouldn't take very long to get where we were going, but it took nearly an hour to get to the top.

When we finally got to the top, the section of the Mesa we wanted to tour was sold out, so we took the hike to Spruce Tree House. The hike into the canyon (yup.. a canyon within a mesa... odd) wasn't too difficult. The cliff-dwellers who lived in this region occupied the area between about 850 and 1250 A.D. That timeframe coincides very closely with the inhabitants of Chaco Canyon, and the Chacoans were known to have traded with the people of Mesa Verde.