Cliff Palace, Mesa Verde National Park, CO - American Guide Series on Waymarking.com

Cliff Palace is Mesa Verde's largest cliff dwelling. Tours of this 150 room, 23 kiva structure, built around AD 1100 run about an hour long...and tickets must be purchased at the Far View Visitor Center. It is worth taking the tour...the rangers are very knowledgeable and will describe more points of interest.

We learned that possibly 100 people lived here in cliff palace, but that a number of the rooms did not have any signs of domestic life, such as fires or wall paintings. Artifacts found in some of these rooms lead archeologists to believe most of these rooms were used for storage, such as food grown on the mesa top above. This dwelling may have acted as a "market" for nearby villages.

It is believed that the ancestral Puebloan people inhabited Cliff Palace for about 100 years. Different stages of construction are apparent in the different styles of structures and mortar. Some walls have been plastered, some still have wall paintings. Visitors can see soot deposits from home fires, and identify which areas acted as community spots, or just living quarters within the alcoves.

Getting down to the cliff dwelling is via a steep "staircase" and climbing back up to the mesa top involves climbing five 8-10 foot ladders. After the dwelling was discovered in 1888, many visitors gained access to these sites, and now you are treading on the same steps engineered by the archeologists over one hundred years ago.

Right from the parking space by foot trail to a high point, 200 ft., overlooking the ruin; north from here into the canyon and souteast to CLIFF PALACE, 0.2 m, the largest known cliff dwelling. This great structure, which once had an estimated population of more than 400, lies in a cave 300 feet long and 100 feet high, just under the mesa rim. Built between 1073 and 1273, it was one of the earliest of the Mesa Verde cliff houses. From an architectural standpoint, Cliff Palace is especially interesting. Its buildres, faced with an oputward sloping cave floor, were forced to use terraces, with the result that there are six distinct floor levels...