Season: May 15 to Oct. 15.

Administrative Office: At headquarters in park.

Admission: During season, registration and yearly auto permits issued at park entrance; fee $i. At other times, register and obtain permit at park headquarters.

Transportation: One entrance only, from US 160 (see Tour 11), 5 miles west of Mancos (see Tour 11C). Rio Grande Motor Ways, Inc., operates stages daily June 15-Sept. 15 from Grand Junction by way of Montrose, Ouray, Durango, and Mancos, to Spruce Tree Lodge in park. Hunter Clarkson, Inc., operates two-day round trip tours in season from El Navajo Hotel, Gallup, N. M. Cannon Ball Stages operate daily from Gallup, by way of Shiprock and Farmington, N. M., connecting with Rio Grande Motor Way at Durango.

Highways within park total 31 miles. Ruins south of Park Contact Station visited only under supervision of park authorities. Saddle horses, camp outfits, and guides available at Park Headquarters for short and overnight pack trips: fees range from $1 for first hour to $15 a day per person, with lower rates for parties.

Accommodations: Spruce Tree Lodge at headquarters has cottages and floored tents (medium-priced, American and European plans), and detached bathhouse (fee 50¢) ; open officially June 15—Sept. 15, with informal accommodations throughout season. Free camp grounds near headquarters; spring water, sanitary facilities, firewood, laundry tubs.

Medical Service: Federal Government hospital at headquarters.

Post Office and Communications: Telephone and postal service at headquarters; telegrams sent prepaid to Mancos will be telephoned to addressee at Park Headquarters. Address: Mesa Verde National Park, Colo.

Special Regulations: Free-wheeling prohibited. Fires may be built only in designated spots and must be completely extinguished before leaving camp; only firewood provided near campsite may be used; use of axe on standing timber or stripping of bark from junipers forbidden. Hunting prohibited within park; animals and birds must not be frightened or harmed. Flowers may be picked only with written permission of superintendent or park naturalist. Visitors at ruins must be accompanied by guides; any marking or injury of ruins or other park properties forbidden.

Flora and Fauna: Coyotes, foxes, rabbits, porcupines, prairie dogs, and squirrels; mule deer, black bear, mountain lion, and bobcats are occasionally seen. More than 200 varieties of birds have been recorded. Trees on Mesa Verde are pinion, juniper, Douglas fir, and western yellow pine, with scrub oak and mountain mahogany at higher elevations, aspen and box elders in canyons. Principal wild flowers include the Mariposa lily, Indian paint brush, penstemon, lupine, and wild sweet pea.

Summary of Attractions: Approximately 350 cliff dwellings, 400 mesa top pueblos, and several hundred Basket Maker pit dwellings in park. Motor trips, hikes, and horseback trips offer close inspection of excavated cliff dwellings, mountain scenery, interesting geological formations, flora, and fauna. Daily campfire lecture at 8 p.m. in circle at Park Headquarters by scientists and members of park staff on life and customs of Cliff Dwellers, followed by ceremonial dance by Navaho Indians. Interesting collections in museum and community building.

The MESA VERDE NATIONAL PARK includes 50,275 acres of canyons and mesa lands set aside by the Congress in 1906 for the preservation of its many ancient cliff dwellings and surface pueblos. Mesa Verde (Sp. green table) is itself a great mound of earth and rock about 15 miles long and 8 miles wide; on the north it rises abruptly 2,000 feet above Montezuma Valley. South of this rim is a sloping expanse cut by deep and almost parallel canyons caused by heavy spring rains running off into the Mancos River. The mesa terminates at the south in a series of bluffs more than 1,000 feet high. Along the walls of the canyons are found the most spectacular cliff dwellings.

The first recorded observation of the Mesa Verde region was made by Padre Escalante in 1776 while seeking a short route from New Mexico to the Spanish missions in California. Escalante noted the crumbling ruins throughout this area; although he did not climb the great mesa, he bestowed upon it its descriptive name.

One of the earliest archeological explorations was made by W. H. Jackson under the auspices of the Federal Government in 1874, but he and his party did not discover any of the larger ruins. In a dramatic discovery in 1888, Richard Wetherill and Charlie Mason, two cattlemen who had come on horseback to Sun Point, looked across a deep canyon and saw with amazement the great structure of Cliff Palace nestled in a cave high on the opposite wall. Word of this discovery inspired Baron Gustav Nordenskiold's exploration in 1891. Nordenskiold investigated many of the ruins, including Spruce Tree House, and assembled a large collection of Indian pottery and artifacts which he sent to Sweden. Although intended for the Royal Museum at Stockholm, the collection remained in warehouses until 1938 when it was removed to a museum at Helsinki, Finland. Subsequent explorations, most of them conducted by the late Dr. J. Walter Fewkes, once chief of the Bureau of American Ethnology, established many facts about the vanished race of "little people" who constructed the immense and beautiful dwellings in great crevices along the canyon walls. As yet, only relatively few of the several hundred known cliff dwellings and pueblos in the park have been excavated.

The original occupants of the natural caves on Mesa Verde, it is believed, were primitive Mongoloid hunters who used them as temporary shelters after their migration from Asia to Alaska by way of the Aleutian Islands some ten to twelve thousand years ago. The race made slow progress for several thousand years, and not until they learned to grow maize and other plants did any great change occur.

The Basket Makers are the earliest people known to have permanently settled on Mesa Verde, as early as 500 B.C. These longheaded people constructed circular subterranean rooms both in the caves and on the mesa tops. In time they improved their masonry; rectangular lines supplanted circular forms; the original one-room units were enlarged and joined with others in various arrangements; skill in pottery was developed.

Discovery of skeletons with round or broad skulls indicates the advent about 1,000 A.D. of an alien people who absorbed or supplanted the Basket Makers. The infiltration of this new race was slow and was not accompanied with violence. The first Pueblo Indians, as these intruders are known, had not developed as high a culture as the Late Basket Makers, but study of masonry and pottery reveals their progressive advancement until, in the classic period of their culture, they could build the elaborate stone cliff houses that remain a monument to their taste and skill. The men of this race ranged from 5 feet 6 inches to 5 feet 9 inches tall; the women were slightly smaller. As infants, they were strapped to cradle-boards that flattened and deformed their heads.

Peaceable by nature and farmers by trade, these ancient people, it would appear, did not become cliff dwellers by choice. Doubtless they were driven to build their fortress homes along the face of almost-unscalable cliffs from fear of marauding bands of nomadic and war-like Indians. There is evidence that, left to themselves, they would have been content to live quietly on the mesa tops where many of their earlier community houses and temples were erected.

The pit houses of the Basket Makers, several hundred of which are scattered through the park, were abandoned for surface pueblos. But as the pressure of enemies increased, the Pueblo began building in the great natural caves that line the canyon walls. These buildings were constructed of sandstone blocks, broken from rock sheets on the mesa top and lowered over the walls; stone from the early surface pueblos was also used. Although the Cliff Dwellers had no metal, they fashioned remarkably effective stone instruments; with a stone axe found on the mesa, a 4-inch aspen tree was cut down in six minutes.

The plan both of the surface pueblos and the cliff dwellings indicates that the inhabitants were divided into kinship groups or clans, each with a set of rooms. Each clan had its own living quarters, granaries, and kiva, a ceremonial room used exclusively by men, usually subterranean, but occasionally built back into a cave and solidly inclosed. Most of the structures began with a few rooms and a single kiva, to which additions were later made.

The Pueblo were able farmers; they grew corn on the dry mesa tops, and beans, squash, and cotton orj the moister canyon floors. They gathered the prickly pear, removed the spines, and ate the flesh raw or roasted. They shot and ate wild turkey; they also domesticated the turkey which was raised primarily for its plumage for use in making feather blankets, clothing, and personal ornaments. They wove cloth from cotton and yucca fibers.

The men were hunters, farmers, and weavers; looms have been found in the ceremonial rooms forbidden to women. From the bows, arrows, spears, stone balls, and axes that have been uncovered, and from the fortified entrances to the cliff houses, it is evident that these people could and did fight when forced to.

The women were the millers, bakers, and pottery makers of the communities, and apparently assisted in constructing the buildings. The clay found between sandstone strata was fashioned into excellent pottery. Walls were coated with puddled earth plastered on with rocks and hands; fingerprints of workers still remain on many of the walls. Occasionally a white paint, made of powdered gypsum mixed with water, was applied with grass or cedar bark brushes. The Cliff Dwellers had no written language, but pictographs on the stone walls, baskets, and pottery reveal a high artistic sense.

Archeologists have deduced that the Cliff Dwellers were undone by sand and drought. Corn, the staple of their diet, was ground to meal with instruments made of the prevailing soft sandstone of the mesa country. As this stone wears with rubbing, much sand found its way into the meal and gradually wore down teeth to the gums, as evidenced in almost all skeletons discovered. Bad teeth doubtless caused gastric disorders and severe attacks of rheumatism; after the age of 30, so scientists believe, the Cliff Dwellers suffered constant ill health.

The Cliff Dwellers, it has been definitely established, occupied Mesa Verde and the surrounding country into the thirteenth century. Probably the great drought between 1276 and 1299 drove them from Mesa Verde, and their fate remains something of a mystery. They may have been absorbed by other Pueblo communities in the Southwest; they may have been decimated by more warlike Indians; some anthropologists believe that the present New Mexico and Arizona tribes are descendants of the prehistoric people who left fascinating evidences of their culture here on Mesa Verde.