Mesa Verde National Park United States

Legendary

The park preserves the largest cliff dwellings in North America.

Photo by Jeff Hollett

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In December 1888, two cowboys were tracking lost cattle through a snowstorm when they reached the edge of a canyon. Across the gap, through the falling snow, they saw walls and towers built into the cliff.

They climbed down on a homemade ladder and explored a stone village with more than 150 rooms. They named it Cliff Palace.

The park sits in southwestern Colorado, on a high, flat-topped mountain covered in green juniper and pine trees. Spanish explorers looked at it and called it Mesa Verde, which means "green table."

People passed through here a very long time ago. Nomadic hunters called Paleo-Indians followed game across the region as far back as around 7500 BC.

The people who built the cliff houses came much later. Around 550 AD, the Ancestral Pueblo people settled on the mesa top, farming corn, beans, and squash.

For centuries they lived in pit houses and then in stone villages. Only in their final hundred years, starting around 1200, did they move down into the cliff alcoves.

They built about 600 cliff dwellings in all. Most are small, with just a few rooms, but the biggest are entire towns tucked under rock overhangs.

Cliff Palace is the largest cliff dwelling in North America. Around 100 people lived there, and it has 23 round underground rooms called kivas, used for ceremonies.

Then, around 1300, everyone left. Drought, crop failures, and other pressures may have pushed them south, and their descendants still live in Pueblo communities in New Mexico and Arizona today.

After the cowboys' discovery, treasure hunters began looting the ruins. Two women, Virginia McClurg and Lucy Peabody, campaigned for years to protect the site.

President Theodore Roosevelt made it a national park on June 29, 1906. It was the first national park created to protect the works of people rather than natural scenery.

Join a ranger-led tour of Cliff Palace, which involves climbing ladders and steep stone steps. Try Balcony House if your family is up for crawling through a tunnel and scaling a 32-foot ladder. Drive the Mesa Top Loop to see how the homes changed over 700 years.