Today we had bacon and eggs for breakfast.  We left for our 10:00 tour about 8:30 because we had a long ride to Cliff Palace.  We got there about 9:15.  After taking a bathroom break and changing from sandals to hiking shoes, we were ready.  We walked to the area that told us to wait for the ranger there and we waited.  About 10:00, the ranger arrived and warned the group that it was a fairly strenuous tour.  We needed to take water and be in good health.  He also warned us that we had to climb a fairly steep ladder to get into Cliff Palace. 

Then we started walking toward the ruins.  The ranger took the group through Cliff Palace talking about the Anasazi or Ancestral Puebloans who lived in Mesa Verde from 1100 to 1300.  The Ancestral Puebloans built their dwellings beneath the overhanging cliffs.  Their basic construction material was sandstone which they shaped into rectangular blocks about the size of a loaf of bread.  The mortar between the blocks was a mix of mud and water.  Rooms averaged about six feet by eight feet, space enough for two or three persons.  Isolated rooms in the rear and the upper levels were generally used for storing crops. 

Much of the daily routine took place in the open courtyards in front of the rooms.  Pottery was fashioned there, as well as various tools-knives, axes, awls, scrapers-made from stone and bone.  Fires built in summer were mainly for cooking.  In winter, when the alcove rooms were damp and uncomfortable, fires probably burned throughout the village.

The Ancestral Puebloans spent much of their time getting food, even in the best of years.  Farming was the main business of these people, but they supplemented their crops of beans, corn, and squash by gathering wild plants and hunting deer rabbits, squirrels, and other game.

Fortunately, for us the Ancestral Puebloans tossed their trash close by.  Scraps of food, broken pottery and tools, anything unwanted, went down the slope in front of their homes.  Much of what we know about daily life here comes from these garbage heaps.

In Cliff Palace, there were two hundred rooms and twenty-one kivas or ceremonial rooms.  The kivas at Mesa Verde were underground chambers that may be compared to churches of later times.  Based upon modern Pueblo practice, Ancestral Puebloans may have used these rooms to conduct healing rites or to pray for rain, or luck in hunting or good crops.   Kivas also served as gathering places, and sometimes as a place to weave.  A roof of beams and mud covered each kiva, supported by pilasters.  Access was by a ladder through a hole in the center of the roof.  A small hole in the floor is a sipapu, the symbolic entrance to the underworld.

When we finished our tour of Cliff Palace, we drove to a picnic area where we ate our sandwiches and chips in the shade of a tree.  Since we had a tour of Balcony House scheduled for 1:00, we decided to drive to that area and wait for the next tour.  When we arrived, the 12:30 tour was starting.  Bob asked the ranger if it would be alright if we joined the tour instead of waiting for the 1:00 tour.  The ranger said that we could.  The ranger again warned people that they must be in good condition and take plenty of water.  She also cautioned us that we had to be able to climb a thirty foot ladder to enter Balcony House and crawl on our hands and knees through a tunnel to exit.