Mesa Verde – Sandstone & Spirits

All wonderful journeys end on a high note. My last stop - and the location for the live radio Travel Show broadcasts – was Mesa Verde National Park. Situated close to where Colorado, Arizona, Utah and New Mexico meet, this is the only National Park in the US devoted to the works of Man. But it is the fusion of huge canyon desert-land scenery and abandoned 700 year old Ancestral Puebloan dwellings that make this place so unique in time and space. I visited Cliff Palace, tucked under overhanging sandstone cliff faces. It was the largest community, four storeys high, accessed by narrow wooden ladders – and it’s just one of over 600 cliff dwellings in Mesa Verde. Wandering around Spruce Tree House, another atmospheric, cliff-sheltered home, I felt the spirit of this mystical place and its long forgotten people…