From the highway in southwestern Colorado, between Durango (where our daughter Mindy lives) and Pagosa Springs, you can see “Chimney Rock”. This distinctive geological formation, as its name implies, looks like a fireplace chimney on the roof of a building.

Because we had a bit of extra time allotted on our way heading east to Alamosa, we decided to take a short detour to visit Chimney Rock National Monument. We arrived at a small building that serves as the park office. Nearby a construction crew was in the process of expanding the headquarters. We parked the car. Rhonda and Kaden sought a bathroom, and I wandered off to take some snapshots of Chimney Rock, a bit closer and at a different angle. I was soon satisfied and started to walk back toward the car.

In the distance I could see Rhonda urgently beckoning me. I quickened my pace to reach them.

“There are ruins of structures of the Pueblo people up on the mountain. We can sign up for a tour, but it leaves in five minutes!”
I went up to a ranger and paid the fee for the three of us and we joined some other visitors who were loading into a pair of 4WD park vehicles.
The driver ascended a rutted dirt road that snaked its way upward, and after about 10 minutes arrived at another parking lot.

The Chimney Rock area was home to several successive Pueblo peoples. A latter group was connected to the inhabitants of the Chaco Canyon site to the south in northern New Mexico.

Kaden suffered from the heat a bit while we were there, but he stuck with us and had a good time. Later he rated the site “Excellent!”

After our visit, we stopped to buy some water from a pair of women who staffed a booth. Kaden (who starts second grade in August) advised them of the correct change to provide from the twenty dollar bill. The were quite nice to him. Encouraged, he quizzed them with his favorite math problem: “What is two times one googol?”
They later cautioned him to “try to not be too much smarter than his teachers.” 🙂

The “Four Corners” area, including southwest Colorado includes extended areas of dry terrain covered with scrub vegetation. “Mesa Verde National Park” is located in this area and includes cultural and archaeological sites of the ancestors of the Pueblo People who still live in America’s southwest. Human presence began about 10,000 years ago with nomadic hunter-gatherers who gave way to early farmers who grew corn and wove baskets.

About a thousand years ago, the residents of this area began to build houses and other buildings above the ground. About 800 years ago complex interconnected structures were constructed within protective openings in cliff walls. Mesa Verde park includes a number of these “cliff dwellings”. The photo below shows a smallish series of buildings in the cliff. Actually, this is the same cliff shown in the panoramic first photo of this post. If you click on that photo to enlarge it, you can see this site in an opening of the cliff at the right side of the image.

One of the most famous complex of cliff buildings is called “Cliff Palace”. Our daughter Mindy had arranged tickets for Rhonda, Kaden, and me to participate in a brief tour of that site, led by a park ranger.

As we began our descent from the rim of the canyon, we got our first glimpse of Cliff Palace.

Our guide had previously worked as a field archaeologist, and was very knowledgeable about Mesa Verde and the people who had lived there. During her explanations, she spoke about the way in which the entire community, including growing children, had participated in the responsibilities of the settlements. Kaden was fascinated to learn that young boys his age would help with the care and feeding of the domestic turkeys. (Much like the way Kaden helps with the chickens and ducks at his house!)

Visitors are fascinated by the buildings and stonework.

(But where was Jack! He and his mom spent the day paddle-boarding on a lake near Durango. Jack had already visited Mesa Verde in 2018 along with Rhonda and our daughter Mindy.
The photo below is from that 2018 trip.)

A few years ago, “Voice of America” (VoA) produced an audio piece explaining Mesa Verde. I have include an adaptation that you can listen to by using the controls below:

A PDF document that includes the same narration can be downloaded using the link below.

Note: Although in my youth, VoA had been rather notorious for its propaganda broadcasts over shortwave radio beamed to various corners of the world, today they offer a much broader content, including materials designed for English language learners. I have used a variety of their materials in my ESL classes and in many cases reconfigured the content to be most useful to fit into lesson plans. Some of these are published on the Open-ESL.org web site.