Today, starting off with an early 6:30 alarm we all piled into the cars at 8 am to start our day! Our hotel in Cortez is located about 30 minutes from the field spot where we spent the whole day: Mesa Verde.
Mesa Verde, Spanish for green table, is widely known for its Puebloan cliff dwellings and clear stratigraphy. The day started off with a couple amazing outlooks into the basin adjacent to Mesa Verde. The basin is predominantly Mancos Shale from the late Cretaceous with a thin layer of loess, extensive wind-blown sediment that in this case is highly Mg and Fe rich from ancestral volcanic activity. The loess allowed from fertile soils and was probably very enticing from the Puebloan people who were largely agricultural.
A few of our outlook stops allowed us to easily see various successive formations within the Mesa Verde Group, (1) the Point Lookout Sandstone, characterized by its cross bedded sandstone with a marine facies; (2) the Menefee Formation, characterized by its terrestrial deposits (like low-grade coal that we saw a lot of in the field); (3) Cliff House Sandstone, characterized by two massive sandstone beds with a thin shaley layer in between, also from a marine depositional environment. This succession allowed us to easily see the transgressive-regressive-transgressive movement of the interior seaway over the course of the Cretaceous.
After discussing more about the history of the Western Interior Basin and the stratigraphy in Mesa Verde, we stopped for a quick lunch before meeting our Park Ranger guide. With her, we scaled a 30 ft, steeply inclined ladder (which was way scarier for us than it feels to write or read) to an actual puebloan cliff dwelling, nestled in the Cliff House Sandstone, about 50 ft down from the rim of the canyon. We learned about the intricacies of their advanced technologies while peeking into their cooking spaces and bedrooms. It felt so special to see such an exclusive nook in American Indian history that has largely been erased forgotten, or excluded from textbooks. The tour ended with a couple very steep ladders and stairs carved into the near-vertical sandstone walls but with a lot of screaming and adrenaline, we made it back to the top.
Our last adventure for the day consisted of a 2.5 mile hike down the canyon wall into the basin, back up again and a jaunt around half of the rim back to the visitor’s center. The hike down was absolutely beautiful and the panoramic views were unparalleled to our past experiences. Some of the basin walls were covered in petroglyphs that the class had a good time trying to interpret before using our hands and knees to get back up the steep incline to the rim.