Wonderoom

This is site number 12 at Mesa Verde. One of my favorites, along with Double House. It’s a small site, but when you’re there you feel like you are walking along a minature avenue. A sort of Tinytown. Like every ruin at Mesa Verde, it has been emptied of virtually every artifact aside from small potsherds and the ubiquitous mini-corncobs. It’s like walking around a three dimensional mystery novel. One you are never going to be able to finish. Pages are gone, somebody spilled coffee on the rest.

You’ve got this time period when a whole extended culture decided to build villages on the sides of cliffs, and then later just abandon the entire region.

It’s fascinating, and people have some amusing theories. I had someone tell me with perfect conviction that the Anasazi were one of the lost tribes of Israel. Walking on water all the way across the Atlantic. Or maybe Moses did some extra credit water parting. Others are sold on the “aliens sucked the Anasazi up in a spaceship” idea. When in doubt, send in the aliens, your all purpose mystery deus ex machina. Alien ex machina. Or…God=aliens. Something like that.

One night while laying down on a rock next to another ruin, I had a revelation. This revelation might have been fueled by what I had been smoking earlier, but it seems obvious to me even now…Mesa Verde was indeed invaded by aliens.

We are the aliens. We stare at screens and boxes, carry little boxes around that we attach to our heads. Most of us tend to lose track of day and night, the change of seasons. We are scarcely residents in our own world.

Maybe the Anasazi will walk out of a vortex in the Bermuda Triangle holding hands with Sasquatch and a big bag of Elvis, but we’re still the aliens.

Like any other interp ranger at Mesa Verde, I led many tours of Cliff Palace. The big one. The site that everyone wants to see. It is impressive, lovely even. It’s also the Disneyland of ancient southwest ruins-heavily stabilized, cleaned up, rubble cleared away, nary a potsherd or corncob to be seen. Even the back has been cleared out. When you are leading tours you have to make a big deal about not standing on the walls or otherwise messing with the masonry, but everything the public gets anywhere near has been heavily stabilized with concrete. It has to be, tens of thousands of people file through there every year. Read more »

I worked at Mesa Verde for two seasons as a ranger. Some of the best times of my life: adventures, mysteries, shenanigans. I saw places forgotten, places forbidden. The backcountry of Mesa Verde has been closed to the casual visitor for decades. It is difficult to gain access to anywhere not open to the public even for determined photographers, archaeologists, etc…. They fear that the sites might be damaged. Mesa Verde is kind of like that giant government warehouse in the Indiana Jones movie- amazing treasures all locked up where no one can ever see them. This fact is what made it so delicious that when I worked there I could fill out a backcountry pass and go. I went on bird counts. I went on back country hikes as part of training. Sometimes I just went backcountry because I felt like it, and I knew that there would be no one else because there never was. All I wanted to do was look, catch a glimpse behind the curtain. And I had the back stage pass. Read more »