Mesa Verde National Park

Posted On January 11, 2022

Dec 5, 2021

One of the highlights for us girls is that daddy got to join us for this park! Since many of our park adventures take place on weekdays, we often have to leave daddy behind to work but since we went on the weekend he was able to join us!

If you’ve never been to Mesa Verde maybe you are like me and didn’t know anything about the amazing history found in this particular park. I would consider this park much more cultural and historical than about visually stunning beauty that you typically find in the western parks. Though we were all blown away by the cities that were built in these cliff walls. Who does that? Why? How? Those are questions we still have! While we don’t know why they decided to build these dwellings we were incredibly stunned at the details and architectural brilliance of the Puebloan peoples over 700 years ago. I look at these cliffs and canyons and would have never thought “now here’s a place for us to build our home” but they did and these structures were quite detailed and amazing including kivas (spiritual spaces), homes for generations of families, and community centers.

We highly recommend the Mesa Top Loop, but be sure you download the audio tour before leaving the visitors center! It’s worth the listen and may be hard to get signal while you are up there. The audio tour is full of great info and history on the Puebloan peoples and the structures you’ll get to get out and view along this 6mile loop. We also made stops to take in Cliff Palace and Spruce Tree, both are must see cliff dwellings! We hiked the Far View sites too. Since it was winter season we were able to get into the Weatherill Mesa area to check out Long House and the museum was also still closed due to Covid precautions. We still managed to have a great time and learn a lot. The girls both had things that wanted to share with you all.

Here’s Rylee telling you what she is learning about kivas –

Makinsley wanted to to tell you about the cliff dwellings. Unfortunately the wind was so bad in her video that you can’t hear her at all so you’re getting the text versions instead –

“Hi, I’m Makinsley Dull and I’m here at Mesa Verde National Park. We are currently about 8,500 feet in elevation and we are currently learning about the towns that were built into these canyon walls. These towns were built by the Puebloan people over 700 years ago. The Puebloan people moved from the mesa villages into these alcoves in the canyon. We don’t know why they moved there. These alcoves likely provided protection to these communities. You can see the details that they built the homes and community structures with even hundreds of years ago.”
~ Makinsley Dull, age 11 while visiting Mesa Verde National Park on Dec 5, 2021

One more from Rylee to tell you – What is a Mesa? (plus a view of one of the cliff dwellings in the side)

Interested in knowing what we are using for homeschool curriculum related to Mesa Verde National Park? There is SO MUCH out there from this park. Crow Canyon and NPS have TONS of options out there for free! This is just a sampling and what I found that worked best with my girls interests –