Mesa Verde

The pics of these Pueblos look like they are in miniature but in reality they are quite large buildings where a lot of people lived to help stack rocks on top of one another to create a decent home.
It makes your mouth water, I got as far as building a rock wall, that felt good and it has a good feel about it too so there is a little bit of envy with people who build a whole village out of that material.
It’s a good material, you walk on top of this desert mesa to see houses built under massive cliff overhangs and the feeling they give sure beats something made out of treated pine and Gyproc with a vinyl floor.

The one exception I would make though is to install a few aluminium windows, this is something they should have considered.
This Mesa is 8,0000ft high, the place is cold enough but in winter it goes under snow so they had to store a lot of food to get them through.
The places they built, the Pueblos housed themselves, their food stores and the ubiquitous scruffy mutt or two so you could imagine in the depths of winter, with a howling blizzard outside, people shivering, stores dwindling, dogs fighting and then someone complaining about who left the windows open.

There was a huge population one and a half thousand years ago living on the Mesa and it started out by people digging holes in the ground to house themselves, a bit basic but being in the ground keeps you cool in the short summer and warm during the long winter.
Eventually the houses rose a little higher and then after that the Pueblonians, (no I’m not having a go that’s what they call them) came along and looked at the enormous caves and thought well, we already have a roof now we just have to fill the bottom in.
This was radical as I tried to build a house from the roof down once with disastrous results but anyway they really were radical and contemporary people as their ingenuity and art show from examples of beautiful designs on everything from bowls to plaster walls inside the Pueblos.Read more