Mesa Verde, Colorado.

For centuries, it seems that condos have been a thing in Colorado. For over 700 years, Native Americans, the Pueblos, lived in communal homes carved deep into the canyon walls at Mesa Verde. Today, the Mesa Verde National Park shares the rich cultural heritage of 26 tribes and gives visitors a glimpse of the lives of these indigenous peoples.

About 1400 years ago, Native Americans living in southwestern Colorado started creating their homes sheltered in the cliffs of the Mesa Verde area. After seven centuries, they moved on but left their construction behind, a treasure trove of archeological history of the Pueblo people.

Even to the casual observer, it’s easy to see why these cliffs were so attractive. The area is beautiful with abundant food sources and the soft sandstone cliffs were easy to excavate and to create bricks, blocks about the size of a loaf of bread. They created a mortar of mud and water to solidify the sandstone block walls and built rooms large enough for two to three people.

From the other side of the valley with a long telephoto lens, it’s possible to see some of the details of the construction of these homes, a “condo” housing some 60 to 90 people. You can see an artist’s rendition of the Spruce Tree House as it might have looked in 1250 AD here.

The design of the park allows the visitor to easily view the layouts of several different residential areas. According to documents on the Mesa Verde National Park website, most of the dwellings were built between 1190 A.D. and 1270 A.D. The biggest of these condos were villages housing more than 150 rooms. A wealth of information about the people who lived during that time can be found in this PDF file here.

The valley is wide with lush growth and the people grew crops of corn, beans, and squash. They also hunted small game, rabbits, squirrels, and deer. They used the abundant pinyon and juniper trees for building and for firewood. They also raised turkeys.

The term “Mesa Verde” is Spanish for “green table”. The area comprises some 52,000 acres on Colorado Plateau near the four corners borders of Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. The valley floors are around 6,000 feet (1,828 m) above sea level and the highest points in the area rise to over 8,000 feet (2,438 m). The terrain gently rises from the south end of the park to the north.

It is possible to visit the cliff dwellings on ticketed tours, but you need to order tickets in advance at recreation.gov or by phone at 877.444.6777. Be sure to order tickets well in advance, the tours are very popular. As a result, we didn’t get a chance to go on any of the guided tours.

For those who don’t mind a short hike, you can visit the Step House on a self-guided tour. You get on the trail at the Wetherill Mesa kiosk. It is a one-mile (1.6 km) trail but is relatively steep. The National Park website says to allow 45 minutes to visit Step House. A ranger is stationed there to answer questions.

You can easily spend an entire day visiting the mesas that are open for viewing. Wetherill Mesa and its nearby trails alone usually take three to four hours, more if you are interested in exploring in greater detail.

There are more images of our visit to Mesa Verde that you can find in my Flickr album here. You can click on any of the images above to view it in 2K HD from my Flickr site and scroll through the entire gallery.

John Steiner