Episode: 3975
Title: HPR3975: Mesa Verde 20230618
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3975/hpr3975.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 18:10:46

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3,975 for Friday the 27th of October 2023.
Today's show is entitled, Mesa Verdi 18 June 2023.
It is part of the series travel.
It is hosted by Ahukah and is about 11 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is our story of a day tour in Mesa Verdi, Colorado.
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We are airing it now because we had free slots that were not filled.
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Hello, this is Ahukah, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio and another exciting episode.
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That is the whole idea.
With that said, what I am going to talk about today is a little travel thing.
This started when my niece was getting married.
She lived in still does, really, lives in Colorado.
We made plans to travel out to Colorado for the wedding.
My wife and I are both retired, so it is not like we have responsibilities that are all that important.
Once you have invested in the airfare and everything and rented a car, why not take a little more time?
Being with the driving three days that we added to our trip, so it was one day of driving to get there, one day of driving to get back to Denver to catch our plane, and that left us with one day on sight.
But it was well worth it.
We went to the Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado, which is located in the southern part of Colorado.
It is not far from New Mexico, and the nearest major town that you might have heard of is Durango.
If we get back that way, we may go into Durango.
There is a nice railway that you can take.
But that is either here or there.
We went to this National Park.
I checked online and found that we could reserve a room at the lodge in the National Park, which I did, and could get a tour there, which I did.
So, we drove down on a Saturday, got there late Saturday afternoon, had dinner, went to our room, so the next morning we got up, and we walked down to what is called the Far View Terrace for breakfast.
We were staying in Far View Lodge. The terrace was maybe a quarter mile down the road, so we just walked there, got our breakfast, and then at 8 a.m. got on the bus.
Now, we had a tour guide, Jan, and Jan had been a park ranger for about 20 years, and is also a Native American, who is a member of the tribal group that is descended from the people who settled Mesa Verde.
So, I felt like we were getting some pretty good inside information.
Now, Mesa is Spanish for Table, and is applied to flat-topped mountains in the west because they kind of look like a table with a tablecloth on it.
Now, the Pueblo people, and at this point I want to make an aside, the Spanish called them the Pueblo people.
Let's know what they call themselves. The Navajo called them Anasazi, which you may have heard, but Anasazi actually means ancient enemy, so that's not a very good name either.
So, today basically we just call them the ancestral Pueblo people.
So, the ancestral Pueblo people lived on top of the Mesa originally. They built settlements there.
Some of which were dug out a footer too, and in walls and a roof added, those are called pit houses.
And we got to see some of these as archaeologists have excavated them.
Now, to preserve the remains, they have erected simple buildings around these sheet metal to keep out the rain and the weather.
Now, the soil is very good there because the winds bring up fine salt from New Mexico that is deposited on the Mesa top.
And we've seen what the winds can do in New Mexico when we were there on our V-trip.
So, that's totally believable. The dust storms we saw in New Mexico were amazing.
Now, these ancestral Pueblo people grew corn, beans, and squash.
They also hunted animals like deer that were available on top of the Mesa.
They were also very skilled at making closely woven baskets, which could be lined with pitch and then used for cooking.
And the way they did that, they'd place water in them and then heated rocks and could cook the food.
Some time later, they developed pottery, but originally they did it with baskets.
Now, the ancestral Pueblo people lived at Mesa Verde for about 700 years and for most of that time lived on top of the Mesa.
But for some reason, around 1200, they started building dwellings in overhangs of the cliffs and abandoned them 100 years later.
A lot of speculation about why that might have happened could have been that they were running into resource issues, or maybe there were enemies that were confronting them, or maybe it just felt it was time to go.
So, for whatever reason, they were there for about 100 years and then they left.
Now, the cliff dwellings were reached by climbing down from the top of the Mesa in most cases.
But the only source of water really was the mancoast river.
And so, all water needed to be carried up to the dwellings, and you can imagine that's not a fun task.
Now, getting to cliff palace, that was the one that we visited.
There were several different sites of cliff dwellings in the park.
One of them was closed for renovation work.
Another one was like, well, to get there, you got to climb a 30-foot wooden ladder and crawl on your hands and we decided we were going to do that.
We were in our 70s.
Get real.
So, we got the cliff palace and that did require going down some very steep stairs and leaving required both steep stairs and three ladders.
This is some insertion.
But it's not too bad for most people.
In fact, in our group, there was a blind man being led around by his daughter and he managed it just fine.
So, on our way back to Far View Terrace, our guide pointed out some sites we could return to, such as the Coyote Village and the reservoir that they built.
So, when we got back, we had lunch, rested a bit, and then went to visit them.
And by the time we were done, the exertion of the tour and the added visits at the altitude of 8,000 feet had taken its toll.
So, it was time for an app.
Then we went back to the restaurant at the Far View Lodge, had a great meal.
Now, I learned something nice on this trip.
There's an organization called Kiva.org, and I've been making small loans through that.
And when I say small, like $25 at a time.
And the idea is that these loans are bundled up and given to people trying to improve their circumstance in third world countries.
And I've mostly been focused on lending to women in Africa.
When I was in grad school, I stayed development economics.
And one of the things I learned is that the best way to improve the status of people in third world countries is to focus it on women.
When women are doing better, everyone's doing better.
But anyway, I've been making these loans, and it's Kiva.org, and I guess I didn't really dig into where the name comes from.
But it turns out it comes from something like Mesa Verde, comes from the ancestral pueblo people.
A Kiva is a kind of communal ceremonial building that the ancestral pueblo people built.
And it was a round structure, half buried in the ground, and then covered by a roof.
The only entrance was a hole in the center of the roof, and people used ladders to enter or leave the Kiva.
And one of the features of a Kiva is a hole in the ground called a Cipapu.
And that represents where the ancestral puebloans emerged from the underworld.
Now, I took a lot of photos, as you might imagine.
And in the show notes, I've put links to the photos that we took at Mesa Verde.
So, if you're interested, you can check it out.
Anyway, this is Huka for Hacker Public Radio signing off, and is always encouraging you to support FreeSoftware.
Bye-bye.
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