Mesa Verde National Park

 

Mesa Verde National Park is absolutely beautiful and full of history. We immediately felt it is less publicized or popular than many such as Arches and Zion, and we are not sure why because we loved it.

 The Pueblo Ruins were so beautiful and you can easily see them without doing the tours. The scenery on the drives and from the Overlooks was amazing as well.

 We highly recommend a visit if you get to the southwest corner of Colorado. You can easily see it in a day, and we actually saw everything we wanted to see in about 6 hours.

 “Mesa Verde National Park was established in 1906 to preserve and interpret the archaeological heritage of the Ancestral Puebloan people who called it home for over 700 years from 600 to 1300 CE. The park protects nearly 5,000 known archaeological sites including 600 cliff dwellings. While still farming the mesa tops, many Ancestral Puebloans lived in pueblos built beneath the overhanging cliffs. The structures ranged in size from one-room storage areas to villages of more than 150 rooms. They continued to reside in the alcoves—repairing, remodeling, and constructing new rooms—for nearly a century. By the late 1270s, the population migrated south into present-day New Mexico and Arizona.”

Mesa Verde

The landscape and surrounding mountains are just as important to see as the Pueblo Ruins.