Mesa Verde & the Four Corners

This corner of Colorado was home to farmers for more than seven hundred years before it was anyone's frontier. Ancestral Pueblo people were farming the mesa tops at Mesa Verde by about 550, and from the late 1190s to the late 1270s many of them moved into villages built beneath the cliffs, from one-room granaries to Cliff Palace and Long House, each of more than a hundred and fifty rooms. By 1300 they had gone south into Arizona and New Mexico to live among kin already there. Twenty-six tribes and pueblos count the place as part of their history, and the national park protects about six hundred cliff dwellings among nearly five thousand sites.

The Nuuchiu, the Utes, held this country when Americans arrived. Richard Wetherill and his brother-in-law Charles Mason came on Cliff Palace in December 1888, and in 1891 the Swedish scholar Gustaf Nordenskiöld dug through the dwellings and shipped hundreds of artifacts, and the remains of the dead, to Europe. Collecting of that kind fed the Antiquities Act, signed on June 8, 1906, and Mesa Verde National Park followed on June 29. Finland, where the collection ended up, agreed generations later to return the remains of twenty people and twenty-eight funerary objects; about six hundred pieces stay in Helsinki.

The Ute Mountain Ute Tribe keeps its own Mesa Verde. Its tribal park covers about 125,000 acres along twenty-five miles of the Mancos River, wrapped around the national park, with cliff dwellings, Ancestral Pueblo petroglyphs and historic Ute wall paintings, and no one enters it without a Ute guide and a permit. East across the La Plata Mountains the Southern Ute Indian Tribe governs from Ignacio, and at the Four Corners Monument, run by the Navajo Nation, four states meet at a single point where Navajo and Ute Mountain Ute land join.

What to See in Mesa Verde & the Four Corners

4 places across the region, grouped by what they are.

Historic Sites

Canyons of the Ancients National Monument

Dolores

The densest field of archaeological sites in the country, and a museum built on the three million objects dug up before a reservoir drowned the Dolores valley.

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Durango and Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad

Durango

Steam to Silverton up the Animas since 1882, and the coal-fired locomotive cinder that federal investigators blamed for the 416 Fire of 2018.

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Mesa Verde National Park

Cortez

A park won by Colorado clubwomen who then fell out over who should run it, drawn first around the wrong ground, and squared with the Weeminuche Utes only in 1911.

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Towns & Gateways

Southern Ute Cultural Center and Museum

Ignacio

A small tribal museum of 1971 rebuilt in 2011 as a $38 million building shaped like an eagle, facing east to the rising sun.

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Scenic Drives through Mesa Verde & the Four Corners

Stories from Mesa Verde & the Four Corners

Mesa Verde & the Four Corners rewards the unhurried. Pick a base, fan out, and let the country between the headline stops surprise you.