Mesa Verde National Park: Shadows of the Centuries - Revised Edition

Smith, Duane

IT DOMINATES THE SKYLINE AND DWARFS MERE MORTALS as they lift their eyes from the valley floor to its two-thousand-foot cliffs and steeply ridged slopes. What they see is Mesa Verde, named by lost generations of Spaniards when they first perceived it as a "green tableland." For travelers coming from the east, a rock promontory intrudes into the view of the valley. The aptly named Point Lookout would have made a superb castle site for a feudal knight from which to survey his fiefdom and repel challengers to his temporal power. But when armored barons were lording it over Europe, a much gentler people were roaming the green mesas in the New World to hunt and eventually settle. They grew crops and built communities, all without the trappings made possible for their European contemporaries by the use of iron. From the north, Mesa Verde appears to forbid entry, but here first impressions deceive. From the rugged northern escarpment, the mesa slopes gently southward toward the Mancos River, which carved the mesa's canyon eons ago. In fact, Mesa Verde has been described as an almost classic cuesta (another word of Spanish origin), a land elevation with a gentle slope on one side and a cliff on the other. The Mancos River flows out of the La Plata Mountains and meanders across the broad Mancos Valley, from there to be clutched by mesa and mountain and then released into a deep trench that circles Mesa Verde to the south. From this curving main canyon, numerous finger canyons slash into Mesa Verde's southern rim, giving birth to small mesas that, taken together, form the larger unit. Some canyons climb slowly almost all the way to the northern crest; others rise more steeply to dissolve into the mesa's heartland. Erosion has carved shallow caves into canyon walls and never stops shifting and shaping. Mesa Verde, after all these millennia, is still changing. It was at least two thousand years ago, long before the Spanish came, that the Indians first appeared and disturbed nature's busy stillness. They must have been intrigued by the unusual rocks and soil that they found; centuries later geologists would classify the basal rock as Mancos shale, a deep marine deposit from the time when all this land was under water. The overlying sandstone gives the mesa its colors, which range from gray to yellow-orange, complemented by a deep layer of rich, red aeolian soil that covers the mesa ridges. All that the virgin land needed to make farming possible was water and someone to till it. The climate and vegetation varied considerably then as now, because elevations on the mesa range from 6,000 to 8,500 feet. For anyone who ventures into these canyons unprepared, water is more precious than gold, although Mesa Verde is neither as dry as its neighboring valleys and plateaus nor as dry as much of the larger semiarid area in which it sits, a borderline component of the American Southwest. Adequate winter moisture is critical to survival of vegetation, animals, and humans. Except for the Mancos River, the streams that carved these canyons dry up in the summer heat, and precious few springs come to the rescue. The hot summer days drive the animals to the shade, and the cold winters lure them down into the warmer, sheltered canyons. Thus does nature observe the changing seasons.