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Of course, the
primary view from this overlook is Cliff Palace itself.
The 1:00 pm tour was still down at the ruins when our 2:00 pm tour started. The tour guide came down and promptly removed her jacket. It was still chilly during her previous tour, but now the temperature was about 65 degrees. During her opening speech, she said that she has a degree in anthropology/archeology. Her job at Mesa Verda is the only job in her entire life where she has ever made any money off of her degree. She said she loves that job. She said that early season tours are one hour, but during the busy summer months, the tours are only half an hour. We may have given up the Wetherill Mesa area, but we got a longer, unrushed tour of Cliff Palace. Completing her speech, she led us down a flight of metal steps to a gate. Here, she collected the tickets and we kept our souvenir part of them. She was the last one through the gate, and locked it behind her. A path led us down and around to a stopping point to the far left of Cliff Palace. When the ranger rejoined us, she got us all seated in a shady area, and gave a lengthy speech about Cliff Palace and the other cliff dwellings in Mesa Verde.
The ranger talked about the discovery of Cliff Palace, how it was ransacked in early days, and how, after the area became a park, an individual spent three months cleaning it up and started restoring it. He was an ethnologist, not an archeologist. He studied Hopi tribes and restored structures based on Hopi lifestyles, which is not necessarily how the original dwellers would have done it.
The Park now counsels with various indian tribes in the area and down
into New Mexico and Arizona, tribes in Colorado and Utah. They come and
sit with the Park Superintendent to manage the way the park is treated.
They believe these ruins represent a part of their heritage. They have
asked the park to do the following, and the park is happy to comply,
which is, no digging in the ground anymore. The ranger added, for
archeologists, this is a near-death experience. They have tried
compensating for it by computer mapping. The ranger stated that the
bookstore has an extensive map of Cliff Palace. (We didn't go into the
bookstore, so we didn't see the map.)
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