Far View

In 1906 Congress established Mesa Verde National Park, the first to expand the parks concept beyond exclusively preserving scenic natural wonders (like Yellowstone), to include the “works of man.” In 1888 the Wetherills, a local ranching family, stumbled upon magnificent and mysterious cliff dwellings perched in caves up Mesa Verde’s canyon walls. Throughout the 1890s [...]

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Riders of the Purple Sage

We are heading north across the Great Sage Plain—a gently rolling 1500 square mile plateau covered with wind-blown soil and gray-green scrubby sagebrush. It stretches across southwestern Colorado and southeastern Utah and holds the highest density of prehistoric and historic sites in North America, according to the Bureau of Land Management. It’s thought that upwards of [...]

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Winter’s Closing In

This afternoon it is snowing here in Albuquerque. It’s at least an inch deep in my backyard. Just after 3:00 pm, it’s 27°. This is not standard end-of-October weather. Today’s average temperature is 65°. Yesterday, I sat in front of our first-of-the-season fire, reading up on Mesa Verde in southwestern Colorado, where we’d taken a [...]

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Where Have All the Aspens Gone?

Last week we visited Mesa Verde in Southwestern Colorado. The homeplace to thousands of Ancestral Puebloans for 600 years, the mesatop stone cities and cliff palaces carved into canyon cliff walls were abandoned over the course of the final quarter of the 13th century. Why did they leave? A question with too many answers—extended drought, [...]

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