Square Tower House Overlook Trail and Pit Houses

The Square Tower House Trail is a 500 foot paved route to an overlook of the Square Tower alcove ruins site. It is the third stop on the Mesa Top Pithouse to Pueblo Tour at Mesa Verde National Park in southwest Colorado..

The Pithouse to Pueblo Tour is self guiding and visitors usually move their vehicles from stop to stop. During the winter months, the road and short trails are cleared of snow. The section from Square Tower to Sun Point, or further to Sun Temple, is a good hiking opportunity on a hard surface with little traffic.

It is thought that the site of Square Tower House was used as a resting and storage site very early in the human history of the Mesa Verde area. A storage pit was found here from the era when farming on the mesa tops was just beginning. Centuries later, after life on the mesa top was well established, the alcove was re-established as a residence site. At 28 feet tall, the Square Tower is the tallest structure in Mesa Verde.

The Square Tower site is thought to have been built and used during the years from 1200 to 1300 AD. About 60 of the original 80 rooms are still standing. There is a seep spring below the alcove that provided water. Square Tower has a little known neighbor to the north, around a corner called Little Long House that isn’t visible from a road side viewpoint. An unmarked side trail near the petroglyph on the Petroglyph Trail leads to a viewpoint.

My pictures of this site in the summer show more shade, while in winter the site gets full sun, just the way you would want it. For a hiker, there is the opportunity for a 3 mile round trip hike to the Sun Point area with several sites to visit along the way. (In 2011 and 2012 there have been ranger guided hikes down into the Square Tower House alcove. Use the label Square Tower House Guided Hike to find more info.)

These sites explain the development of living styles from the first pit houses to the large alcove sites visible at sun point. On a sunny winter day this is a very pleasant walk when the other trails are snow covered. In early February I walked on a sunny 30 F degree day with at least two feet of snow along the roadside.

The first permanent dwellings in the Mesa Verde region were the Pit Houses. These living spaces are numerous at Mesa Verde but only a few are developed for viewing along the trails. The Chapin Mesa Pit House to Pueblo Tour and the Badger House Trail on Wetherill Mesa have several exhibits under protective roofs that show the development of the early pit houses into the large alcove sites for which Mesa Verde is famous.

The pit house sites don’t look like much at first glance as they only show the pits and not the roofing or any of the artifacts of everyday life. The small opening between the two pits is the ventilation shaft, allowing fresh air in as the smoke from the fire pit rises and exits through the roof opening. The ventilation systems are among the many clever features that we see in the more advanced kivas. Sifting through the debris of these sites, charred materials are often found indicating that fires occurred here frequently.

The fourth stop on the Chapin Mesa Pit House to Pueblo tour shows the smaller pit to have been converted into the main living area after a fire. The same stop has an example of the beginnings of above ground room blocks. The pit rooms gradually became deeper and became the stone lined kivas that we see at the alcove and advanced mesa top sites.

The interpretive signs at these sites emphasize the religious and ceremonial nature of these excavated chambers, but when visiting here in February when the temperatures are below freezing and there is several feet of snow on the ground it seems that keeping warm would be the priority concern,

The Mesa Verde area was abandoned by about 1300 AD for reasons that are not clear. Among the reasons could be that by 1300, the large population here had used up all the winter fire wood. There was a burst of alcove building from 1200 to 1300.Viewing the many alcove sites at nearby Sun Point in winter, the alcoves are sunny and snow free while the mesa top is still frozen under deep snow.

The Anasazi Heritage Center in nearby Dolores, CO has a reconstructed pit house inside the museum. The construction details of the roof aren’t as clear as at Step House but the smaller sunken area in front of the pit house is well illustrated with some typical artifacts including pottery, baskets, an ax and a grinding stone.

There is a display of pictures that shows the experience of an archaeologists attempt to build a pit house today. It is mentioned that it took 8000 strokes with a stone ax to cut an 11.5 inch log. This seems to be about 12 hours of chopping per log.