Created in 1906 to preserve the history of the Ancestral Pueblo people (once referred to as the Anasazi people), Mesa Verde National Park includes 4500 archaeological sites 600 of which are cliff dwellings.  While the park’s landscape provides a beautiful backdrop for cities like Cortez and Dolores, what may be discovered inside the park is dumb-founding.

We visited Mesa Verde National Park in June 2020.  The park was open to visitors, but some sections of the park were closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.  Here are our suggestions for:

The Top 5 Things to Do When Visiting Mesa Verde National Park

1. Drive Chapin Mesa road (open all year) — this 21-mile road takes you from the park’s entrance to the southern-most spot in the park.  You’ll find several places to stop and look out at the natural beauty around you. 

2. Explore the stops along the Mesa Top Loop (open daily from 8 a.m. – sunset) – This self-guided, six-mile loop leads you through time beginning with an archeological site dating to around 550 AD and progressing to the more recent cliff dwellings dating to around 1250 AD.  Download the audio tour and listen in your car or on your phone as you explore this area.  Be sure to stop at the scenic overlooks as well to view the cliff dwellings.

3. Drive the Cliff Palace Loop – while you can see the Cliff Palace from overlooks along the Mesa Top Loop, it’s worth driving this six-mile loop to get a feeling for the land’s topography.

4. Drive Wetherill Mesa Road (open May – September weather permitting) – NPS website currently shows this side of the park is closed. Be sure to check in advance and to take note of the time as this road to this side of the park closed quite early on the day we visited. This twelve-mile road stretches along the west side of the park and offers several other scenic overlooks.  It ends at the Long House Loop.

5. Plan a return visit – to see Balcony House, Cliff Palace, and Long House up close in a ranger-guided tour.  Unfortunately, there are currently no ranger-guided tours available.  But viewing the cliff dwellings from a distance has us thinking about when we will return to get to see them up close.  And while it is a bummer that you can’t visit these parts of the park currently, there is still plenty to see making a park well worth your time!

Bonus: if time allows and you like to hike, there are several hiking trails open despite the pandemic. For more information about these hiking trails, visit the NPS website, or click HERE.

Perhaps more than any other place we’ve been in our journey to date, Mesa Verde National Park has my imagination running wild. What was life like for the people who lived there? How did they come to construct multistory buildings? What happened or changed that made them abandon the cliff dwellings and the life they had established? What went through the minds of the ranchers who first reported finding these cliff dwellings in the 1880s? It’s certainly a place that encourages imagination. And I look forward to going back someday.