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Nathan Rice

Skiing past Far View House ruin at Mesa Verde National Park,

Nathan Rice

Cliff Palace in the winter at Mesa Verde National Park

Nathan Rice

A skier peers into a kiva in Mesa Verde National Park.

Skiers on the Cliff Palace Loop Road at Mesa Verde National Park.

Looking down on Cliff Palace, pink sunset painting rounded tower walls, we are transported 800 years into the past. Smoke rises from square holes atop roofed kivas. Women labor over stone metates, grinding corn into meal. Laughter and strange, foreign syllables echo from the sandstone alcove that houses the largest ruin in Mesa Verde National Park. Snow covers the ground.

We stand in silence as evening falls into night, imagining the lives of the ancestral Puebloan people who once thrived here. As I pull up the hood of my jacket in the cool wind, I suddenly realize that something is wrong with the picture in my head: Everyone is wearing loincloths . . . and it's 20 degrees Fahrenheit.
Every museum diorama I can remember depicts these desert people as mostly naked, toiling under the blazing sun. I'm instantly grateful for the synthetic insulation keeping me warm in the winter chill, from ski boots to polypropylene underwear - stuff I'd usually take for granted. But for all of my imagining into the past, somehow it never occurred to me: How did these people stay warm in the frigid depths of winter?
This trip back in time is not your typical cross-country ski outing in the mountains. Here in the Four Corners, where the Rockies meet the Colorado Plateau, winter storms descend on ancient ruins and make it possible to ski into the Puebloan past. Doing so only deepens the mysteries already there.
That morning, we had a rough plan to ski somewhere and find some ruins. Shawn, John, Aneka, and I racked skis on the car and drove up and onto the now-white promontory of Mesa Verde. Parked at the closed gate to the Cliff Palace Loop Road, it seemed straight-forward enough: Follow the road for six miles and end up back at the car.
Ski tracks led out through burned forest, a stark landscape of white, gray, and black - beautiful and bleak under the powder-blue sky. Big forest fires have torn through Mesa Verde over the last decade, turning piñon-juniper forests from green to charcoal. The cool air smelled like snow, like cold, wet stone.
We donned our ski gear and headed out, eager to get moving in the crystalline afternoon light. The collective swish-swishing of our skis was the only sound until the silence was suddenly shattered by a startling crack. A dead tree crashed to the snowy ground. We laughed nervously and skied on.
At the intersection of the loop road, we took a left, and John broke trail. We were apparently the first party to venture out this way since the last snowfall, at least of the human sort. The road was still being heavily used by wildlife, their tracks peppering the snow-covered road. Time was frozen on the white page of snow, recording their meandering paths.
Challenging our collective tracking skills, we tried to identify our fellow travelers, deer being the most obvious. Aneka spotted fawn tracks, with lines between hoof prints showing where its short legs dragged through the deep snow. A set of curious weasel-like tracks on the thin snow crust padded off into the trees, too small to be a bobcat. After some deliberation, we decided on ringtail, a nocturnal mammal that must have trotted by at night when the crust was firm.
As we skied on, I imagined for a moment that all these wandering life-forms contained the spirits of the ancient people who once roamed all over this land. Back in the 1200s, more people lived in the Four Corners than do today. It's hard to believe all of that life just disappeared.
According to the archaeological record, Mesa Verde was deserted by the early 1300s after more than 700 years of occupation. Exactly why they left remains a mystery, but some sort of presence can still be felt. Just being in the vicinity of their dwellings seemed to send my imagination into unknown terrain. I shook it off and kept moving.
We skied past the turn-off that leads out to the Soda Canyon Overlooks. The promise of great views of the Balcony House ruin was tempting, but the falling sun wouldn't allow another 2.4 miles out and back. We stuck to the road and soon broke out of the forest to an expansive view to the east, down into Soda Canyon and over mesa tops to the glimmering La Plata peaks dressed in white.
My eyes leapt into the distance, devouring the view. It took another five minutes to finally notice the ruins across the canyon, our first glimpse into the past. Below the opposite rim, under a huge alcove eroded from the tawny cliff face, were two rectangular castles of the same color, looking like they sprouted right out of the ground. Hemenway House. Our whispered exclamations dissolved into the void of the canyon.
The mind grasps at these ancient ruins, eager to tell stories. I imagined people hauling stones up from the distant canyon floor to build new walls, and was humbled at the effort involved in constructing these well-hidden homes. The weight of stone - a tangible measure of how doggedly they sought the protection of a high viewpoint, an isolated perch. They left old settlements on the mesa tops near farming fields and constructed these complex cliff dwellings closer to the few precious sources of water. Archaeologists suggest that competition for limited resources led the Mesa Verde people to be on the defensive. This can be felt just looking at the secluded orientation of their homes.
We skied on, past a 25 mph speed-limit sign that jolted us back to the present century and seemed eerily out of place. This area would be bustling with tourists in the high season; the lack of people now made up for the presence of traffic signs. Silence here is rare during most of the year, and yet so appropriate for pondering the past.
The road gradually turned to the west and brushed past the Ute Mountain Indian Reservation. A boarded-up shop offers tours of other cliff dwellings on Ute land during the high season. This junction of land designations is a reminder of the layers of human history that have graced this area. The Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, or Weeminuche, are more recent arrivals here, residing on their current reservation for the last 100 years, long after Mesa Verde was deserted. Like the Navajo tribe of Arizona, the Utes do not share lineage with the ancestral Puebloan inhabitants of these ruins. The Navajo word Anasazi, meaning "ancient enemies," is an outdated term for the ancestral Puebloans, considered by some to be derogatory.
When the Puebloan ancestors left Mesa Verde in the late 1200s, they scattered throughout the region, forming or joining numerous tribes that still call the Four Corners home. Taos, Zuni, Acoma, and Hopi are the best known of about 24 Puebloan groups that exist today in New Mexico and Arizona. I wondered how these sites must seem to them, drenched in cultural meaning - what they can see that is invisible to us.
As the road veered to the north, we came to another lookout. John and Shawn braved the snow-covered stairs on their skis while Aneka and I followed in boots. Now looking west down into Cliff Canyon, we combed the canyon walls for hidden ruins. Just below and to the right was a small structure clinging precariously to a high alcove. Across the canyon were mortared walls built right into the face of the cliff, impossibly inaccessible. We tried to find any access point from above or below and finally decided that there must have been a ladder, long since decayed. Smaller structures high in the cliff walls were likely graineries used for storing and protecting corn and other food. Looking at these dizzily situated structures stirred a sense of fear, a feeling that must have driven them to such extremes.
Excavations of Mesa Verde sites show a tumultuous ending in the late 1200s. After a period of relative prosperity and population growth in the mid-1200s, the climate shifted to what archaeologists call the Great Drought. Ever tied to fluctuations in rainfall, the people of Mesa Verde suffered from low crop yields and diminishing resources at a time when their population was probably at its peak. Conflicts ensued and before the turn of the century, the castles of Mesa Verde stood empty. Beautiful pottery, crafts, and valuable tools were left behind, suggesting a swift departure. But the exact reasons behind their evacuation - drought, warfare, cultural change - remain unknown.
With the sun closing in on the horizon, we hurried on to Cliff Palace Overlook and arrived just as the last golden pool of sunlight slid up and over the canyon rim, leaving the site in shadow and us huddling into our layers of synthetic insulation.
As the pink aurora of sunset now fades from high, wispy clouds, we figure the time has come to head back. I shake myself free from reverie, snap on my skis, and begin the mellow climb to finish the six-mile loop, bringing up the rear behind the others. Movement fends off the mounting cold.
Darkness is deep as we leave green pines behind and enter the charred remnants of forest where we began. Odd shapes of burned trees are silhouetted against the last blue light in the western sky. I stop as the others swish on ahead. Silence heightens my senses as the pitch dark obscures the line between imagination and reality. Frigid air chills the back of my neck. I shiver and get moving, leaving the Mesa Verde night to its own designs.

*   *   *

The question that struck me at Cliff Palace still tugged on the back of my mind. On my next trip up the mesa, I stopped at the park museum, hoping to find answers. I imagined a plush, rabbit-skin robe encased in glass - something to show me how these desert people survived the harsh Mesa Verde winter.
Instead of rabbits, I found turkeys. An 800-year-old winter boot sewn from domesticated turkey feather yarn looked decidedly un-cozy in the florescent light of the display case, though an improvement over the one made of yucca fiber and insulated with grass. They also made leggings from human hair and turkey feathers, turkey feather blankets, and robes of tanned sheep and deer hides. Architecture played a role as well - the small rooms, tiny doorways, and underground kivas held in the heat from fires that must have burned constantly through the winter, leaving black smoke stains on stone walls.
After the museum, we headed out for a short ski into the Far View ruins. The kiva was buried under 6 inches of snow where people once huddled around a blazing fire, under a sturdy roof now swallowed by time.
Late light threw our dark shadows on the red kiva wall, temporarily erasing the evidence of Gore-tex, ski poles, and the rest of our modern accoutrements. We stood in silence under the same sun and, for a passing moment, the centuries between us and the ancient ones were all but forgotten.

NATHAN RICE is a recent transplant to the Front Range. Writing about the Four Corners helps quell his urge to move back.

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