Mesa Verda and The Four Corners

I had to do a whole blog on Mesa Verda, what a fascinating place, it was discovered in December 1888, by two cowboys, Richard Wetherill and his brother-in-law Charlie Mason, they were riding the mesa top looking for stray cattle when they came across this wonderful place.....Over the next 18 years these two, as well as other various exploring parties and tourist groups made expeditions into Mesa Verde, but they took many artifacts and defaced the sites so protection for the dwellings came with the establishment of Mesa Verde National Park in 1906 by President Theodore Roosevelt. 

Although the area's first Spanish explorers named the feature Mesa Verde, they never saw the cliff dwellings....the term is a misnomer though as true mesas are almost perfectly flat. Because Mesa Verde is slanted to the south, the proper geological term is cuesta, not mesa. 

Starting c. 7500 BCE, Mesa Verde was seasonally inhabited by a group of nomadic Paleo-Indians known as the Foothills Mountain Complex. Later people established semi-permanent rockshelters in and around the mesa. By 1000 BCE, the Basketmaker culture emerged from the local Archaic population, and by 750 CE the Ancestral Puebloans had developed from the Basketmaker culture.

The Mesa Verdeans survived using a combination of hunting, gathering, and subsistence farming of crops such as corn, beans, and squash. They built the mesa's first pueblos sometime after 650, and by the end of the 12th century, they began to construct the massive cliff dwellings for which the park is best known. By 1285, following a period of social and environmental instability and driven by a series of severe and prolonged droughts, they abandoned the area and moved south to locations in Arizona and New Mexico, including Rio Chama, Pajarito Plateau, and Santa Fe.

It was so fascinating! 

But a lot of the sites are closed off due to the threat of falling rocks and because of how unstable the cliff dwellings have become. The same erosion that carved these wonderful sweeping alcoves in these sandstone cliffs will eventually be what causes their demise.

The park has a specialized Park Service climbing team that inspects the bolts and steel beams that hold the sandstone cliffs together, but even with all that, some of the cliff dwellings are suffering irreversible damage! I, for one, am so glad that we decided to stop and see this amazing place!

The next day, we were scheduled to hike in the park, but with my blisters I was not up to that, so we went to the four corners, this is the only place in the United States where you can be in four states at once: Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Colorado. There is a small Monument and you can step into each state

So way cool...First erected in 1899 to honor the only geographic location in the U.S. where the boundaries of four states touch, it is managed by the Navajo Nation and is a waypoint along the Trails of the Ancients. Native American artisans are onsite with handmade jewelry, crafts and traditional Navajo foods so of course I struck up a conversation with a local artisan, she was making sand paintings, such an interesting lady! She told me many stories of the Navajo people...Loved it! All the sand she uses for her painting, she makes herself, from the local stones, she collects them, pounds them into sand and then uses them to make her paintings!