Cliff Palace Foundations

The Cliff Palace Trail is one of three ranger guided tours to large ruins sites at Mesa Verde National Park in southwest Colorado. In 2010, both Cliff Palace and Balcony House opened for the season on April 11. The Cliff Palace Tour lasts for one hour.

The $3 tickets for tours are purchased at the Far View Visitor Center. Cliff Palace is the largest and most famous of the alcove Ancestral Pueblo ruins sites in the United States. The main topics of the tour focus on how why the alcoves were chosen as building sites after centuries of living on the mesa tops, and why they chose to leave after only about 100 years of inhabiting the alcoves.

When you visit these sites several times some of the finer details come into focus. While gathering for the first of three stops on the tour, on the left side of Cliff Palace, a large boulder appears to be built into the complex arrangement of rooms and towers. The ranger points out that the original surface of the alcove was uneven and the floor was leveled with rubble. The floor also seems to include a few of these very large boulders.

Looking closer, the individual stone bricks are fitted very carefully. In 1934, the Park Service was concerned about the stability of this boulder and installed 70 tons of steel and concrete to stabilize the rock. Seventy tons would be about 34 cubic yards or about 4 modern loads of concrete in the large mixer trucks. The current trail down from the canyon rim is narrow and has many twists and steps.

The task of getting that much material to the site seems difficult, but then it is small compared to what was accomplished 800 years ago when the site was originally under construction. When the park service started work, they found that some ancient masonry was already installed under the unstable boulder, indicating that the Ancestral Pueblo engineers were aware of the danger.

There are several advantages of alcove living including better shelter, conservation of fuel, and security of food supplies. One of the disadvantages is that rock slabs will fall from the ceiling. At Cliff Palace and the other main Mesa Verde sites, the fallen rubble has been cleaned up.

At nearby Ute Mountain Tribal Park and the many wild sites in the region, large slabs of sandstone are part of the scene. The Ranger mentioned that among the artifacts found at the Mesa Verde sites are prayer sticks, inserted in the developing cracks. One might think that the prayer sticks were inserted as an appeal to the spirits to secure the cracks, but the Ranger made it sound like they were also a warning device. While enjoying the day on the plaza, if a prayer stick suddenly hit the floor, don’t look up, dive for cover.