Your visit does not start well when the ranger at Mesa Verde (they are the admin for Yucca House) tells you it is “stupid” to go to the site. Yup. She mentioned that she is a trained archeologist and she hardly knows what she is looking at, so “what do you expect to see?” She said I should go to X site because at least there they have signs. I persisted and she just shrugged her shoulders and said there is no point in going, there is “nothing to see.”
We went anyway. But you knew that, right. It was a long drive and to get to the “park” you had to negotiate four miles of dirt road that wound through a rancher’s cattle pasture, park by his house and enter a gate like you would see on your grandmother’s garden. What did we see? Well, one partial wall, several mounds of broken rocks and dirt that clearly covered other rooms, the outline of at least two kivas, maybe three, and scores of pottery shards, decorative and utilitarian. All spread over three or four acres. A big site, protected since 1919 but never excavated. There are no signs to describe the setting but you still “know” that you are in a special place - untouched for 1000 years. You sense the atmosphere of how remote and isolated life would have been and how challenging just to survive. And you can pick up pottery pieces and hold the pot that hands had formed and decorated 900 to 1100 years ago. Magical.
Neither Cindy nor I have finished our degrees in archeology but we still appreciated our brief walks among the ruins and pot shards of Yucca House.
The Visitor Center, the Sign, the Trail and the Gate. NPS saved a few dollars here.
The entrance gate
The exposed wall
The land
