Admittedly, Mesa Verde is a very cool place. And, to my mind, involving several visits over many years, I had scoured the joint from the attic to the basement and from the foyer to the hot tub out back. I knew it in the biblical sense.
That perception changed utterly, as Yeats would say, when the opportunity arose a couple of weeks back to join fellow members of the Heber tribe on an early spring getaway to that quite magical desert and mountain expanse they call Four Corners.
What I’d known, but never really totally understood, was that Mesa Verde National Park (MVNP) spins only part of the story that Mesa Verde as a whole has to tell. Much of the rest of that tale plays out in the adjacent Ute Mountain Tribal Park (UMTP), twice the size of the national park and a quite different slice of carbon-dated roof beams entirely.
Operated by the “Ute Mountain Ute Tribe” and enclosed completely within their reservation boundaries, the Tribal Park came into being as a way for the tribe to both preserve the many Ancestral Puebloan (Anasazi) ruins located on their land and, at the same time, by providing guided tours through the cliff dwellings in question, generate much-needed income.
All I ever really knew about this equally-dazzling mesa landscape I got years ago from the small brochure they hand out where the loop road for “Cliff Palace” and “Balcony House,” within MVNP, offers a turnout to about an acre of UMTP land and a small, often shuttered, information shack.
Much of the Tribal Park is defined by the Mancos River, which cuts through the heart of Mesa Verde, and by the many offshoot canyons that, over geological time, have eroded into the drainages that proved so attractive to these ancient land developers during the waning years of their culture. Location, location, location!
This recent visit to the Tribal Park and the subsequent full-day guided tour through the many cliff dwellings served to showcase my ongoing love-hate relationship with national parks in general and MVNP in particular. Not that it’s any better or worse than any of the other parks and monuments, but the operational differences between the NPS and the Tribal Park proved riveting.
At MVNP, and elsewhere within their system, after you dutifully wait your turn in properly-monitored lines, the NPS takes your hand and leads you down well-paved yellow-brick roads and trails to the respective grandeurs featured in their guide books.
The rangers are passionate and schooled in an eclectic variety of disciplines including, but not limited to, anthropology, archeology, paleontology, geology, astronomy, mythology, climatology, hydrology, desert flora and fauna, stone masonry, and, in some instances, through innuendo, the mating habits of their own seasonal tribe.
My ambivalence with the NPS and its evolving mission centers around the reality that, while at least keeping drillers and developers out (for the time being, anyway), they “protect” wilderness by creating an environment whereby it becomes inundated by millions upon millions, myself included, each year.
The motivations and attitudes are quite different next door. Imagine, if you will, being driven in a multi-passenger van along 40 miles of gravel and dirt roads up to the mesa top while a highly-informative guide, a member of the Ute Tribe, sets the parameters of your visit.
And then, coming to terms with the fact that you might well be the only members of your species in the entire 125,000-acre Tribal Park, you immediately begin your descent, by way of a series of staggered hand-hewn ladders, down a cliff face to a ledge that will become your lone thread of continuity to your former life for an as yet undetermined period of time.
There is absolutely no one else to be seen as you enter one moderately stabilized yet exquisitely lived-in cliff dwelling after another. There are pottery shards and other artifacts by the hundreds and you are encouraged to have your way with them as long as they don’t leave with you. There are absolutely no lines. Can your national park do this?
The overall sense is one of inclusion. The feeling is that, if we hang out just a few more hours, the ancient ones will return. The young Ute tribal members who have allowed us behind their eyes seem to understand that much of this day will never wash off. It’s Mesa Verde with an asterisk. It’s a whole new ballgame.
Jay Meehan is a culture junkie and an observer, participant, and chronicler of the Park City and Wasatch County social scenes for the past 40 years.