Cliff Palace Trail

Cliff Palace is the largest and most famous of the Mesa Verde National Park cliff dweller ruins in southwest Colorado. It's the one that would be featured on the National Geographic specials accompanied by some somber flute music.

The trail head is on the Cliff Palace Loop Road in the Chapin Mesa area of the Park. Cliff Palace is one of the three major sites that requires a $3 ticket for a ranger guided one hour tour.
The trail down has a lot of rough steps and slides through some narrow openings and has ladders to climb up and down. If you have bad knees or hips, stay on top, the ranger advises.

The answer to the question of why they lived there seems to be that they used the cliff dwellings more for storage than to live in, mostly still living on the mesa tops.

Sheltered under the stone roof, the cliff dwellings were cooler in summer and warmer in winter if they faced the south. In the Chapin Mesa Museum there is a pot that was filled with 700 year old corn that was found in one of the ruins.

The Cliff Palace contains 217 rooms and 23 circular kivas and is thought to have supported a population of about 200. As large as it is, this site was used for only 75-100 years. The whole Four Corners area was abandoned by 1300 AD and these sites lay vacant for centuries.

Looking back up toward the trail head area, the forest resources here are Pinon Pines and Utah Juniper trees. The canyons where the cliff dwellings occur are porous sandstone.

Water seeping down through the rock loosens the grains and the cave like alcoves form. Only a few alcoves are large enough for a very large structure like Cliff Palace.

The ceremonial Kivas are one of the interesting features of the cliff dwellings and other Ancestral Pueblo sites. The Kivas seem to usually have a ventilation shaft, unlike most of the rectangular rooms. Around the circle, the columns supported the roof structure which included the entryway. Most kivas seem to have been entered from the top but a few have side entrances. We usually see the kivas without the roofs.

At the far end of the Cliff Palace, the second level structures are visible. The fine stone work that was used here is also visible. Some of the structures at this end were reconstructed and stabilized by the Park Service.

There are more ladders to climb to exit the site. Some of the hand and toe holds that the residents used are also visible.