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Mesa Verde National Park |
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Mesa Verde National Park is located in the southwestern corner of Colorado and is renowned for cliff dwellings built by the Ancestral Puebloans (sometimes referred to as Anasazi). Although these Native Americans had lived in the area for centuries, around the year 1200, they moved under overhangs tucked in the walls of cliffs and built cities with multi-storied structures housing 100 to 400 people each. However, the Ancestral Puebloans used these incredible constructions for less than 100 years. By the year 1300, they had left the area for reasons that remain a subject of scholarly debate to this day. Most of the cliff dwellings can be visited only by taking ranger-led tours; most of the hikes are short, but they require walking up uneven staircases and climbing ladders. The most adventurous tour, to Balcony House, includes climbing a 32-foot ladder, crawling through a 12-foot-long tunnel, and climbing a 60-foot stairway carved out of the face of a rock. The park features scenic drives of the natural, geologic formations and the human-made structures of this UNESCO World Heritage Site. Current Internet Travel Offers for Mesa Verde...
This article is based on work found at WikiTravel. A list of contributors is available a the original article. This article is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 1.0 license.
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