Mesa Verde

Day 10
Another day, another National Park - so pleased we bought an annual pass !
Today we visited Mesa Verde ( Spanish for green table ) which offered a spectacular look into the lives of the Ancestral Pueblo people who made it their home for over 700 years from around 600 AD to 1300 AD .
This park protects nearly 5000 known archaeological sites including 600 cliff dwellings, these sites are some of the most notable and best preserved in the United States.
We took a self guided tour around the best preserved one in the park - the dwellings are set in alcoves (around 216ft long by 89ft deep) in the sandstone and this one consists of at least 120 rooms .
This dwelling was excavated in 1908 .
I took this picture from above and hopefully shows the scale of this one site.