How often do you get to climb into a Pueblo Cliff Dwelling?

Just outside Manitou Springs, is an attraction they bill as Manitou Cliff Dwellings.  These are actually Anasazi ruins that date back 800 to 1000 years old.  However, they are no longer in their original location.  The original 40 rooms were in a canyon located in the Southwest corner of Colorado.  From their history page:

Over a several year period, the ruins from McElmo Canyon were collected, packaged, and finally moved by oxen out of McElmo Canyon to Dolores, Colorado. There, they were loaded and shipped by railroad to Colorado Springs, and finally brought to Cliff Canyon by horse and wagon.  Crosby’s men then faithfully reassembled the dwellings in dimension and appearance to those in the four corners region, instead they used a concrete mortar in 1907 as opposed to the adobe mud/clay mortar the Anasazi used.  This allows individuals to walk inside and tour through our dwellings. The Manitou Cliff Dwellings is a preserve of these ancient dwellings, here to protect them for future generations to visit.

Soooo, because they used cement, instead of natural adobe mortar, visitors are permitted to wander in and around the ruins, without fear of destruction.  Here's what they looked like when we got there early in the morning.

We went through the museum first, then came out to the ruins to begin exploring.  And this is what it looked like by then!  Wow, where did all those people come from???

This is a bread oven, and it holds about 30 loaves at a time. It is constructed of adobe bricks, covered with earth and straw.  A fire would be built inside, and left to burn for hours.  A large flat rock partially cover the opening.  When the fire died, the ashes would be removed and the bread loaves placed inside to bake (the wooden paddle was used for placing the loaves inside).  The oven, or horno, was originally constructed in 1920 by Chief Little Deer, but due to usage and natural weathering, it required some reconstruction in 1999.  Work was done by a local stonemason, and the oven is still in use today.

There is a free standing Pueblo, that, today, serves as a museum/gift shop.  It was actually erected at the turn of the century, specifically to house a Native American family of dancers that lived onsite and entertained visitors for 3 generations.  This family lived in the Pueblo until 1984.

Inside the museum were several historical artifacts, and the explanations behind them.  There were several examples of bones and skulls, but I could really relate to this young lady.  Can you see the arrows pointing to the holes in the top of her head?  Drilling was the method of choice for migraine relief during her lifetime.  Oh my word!  At first, I was horrified by it. But, then again, the more I thought about it, sometimes, it seems as if drilling a hole might relieve pressure, so maybe it was a little more logical and pain-relieving than you'd think.  All the skeletal artifacts were actually facsimiles, because the Antiquities Act of 1906 protects all fossils and skeletons found in National Parks and Monuments.  Knowing they were just copies made it only a little easier to view them; they were still pretty creepy.

These two skulls showed some of the oral issues suffered by the elder women of the tribe.  Corn was a staple of their diets, and some form of cornmeal was served with every meal.  Corn was ground in sandstone, by other rocks, and the resulting mixture was gritty.  And in order to make the cornmeal more palatable, the elder women would chew some cornmeal into a paste.  Their saliva would break down the cornmeal and turn the starches to sugar.  When they'd chewed it enough, they would spit it back into the communal pot to make the dish sweeter.  A lifetime of such chewing made for quite a mess in the mouth of these ladies.  Sure makes me appreciate that I can just go to the store, buy sugar in a bag, and scoop some out when I need it!

This was one of the earliest types of structures; it held four families and was originally 2 stories tall, with the lower story's walls solid.  This shows the outer wall collapsed, along with part of the floor of the 2nd story.  The little indentations on the right are actually the ladder up to the door, which is the larger, rectangular hole in the wall. 

This is the view, looking down into the Kiva, a room used for religious rituals and political meetings of the early Puebloans. 

Dick climbed up the ladder to the 2nd story, but even he didn't enter!

 After seeing all there was to see at the Cliff Dwellings, we went down into Old Colorado City.  Like most historic city areas, new shops and boutiques, and bars, lots of bars, have moved into old buildings in an effort to revitalize the downtown areas.  There were shops of Tibetan/Indian culture, head shops, a glass blower (who apparently specializes in handblown bongs!), a VERY small quilt shop, some Colorado souvenir/T-shirt shops, and a chocolate shop.  Nope, no fabric purchased.  No chocolate either, can you believe it? 

There was an old gold miner's car from Cripple Creek at one corner that caught our eye.  Other corners held flowering rock gardens or buckets and pots of annuals all in bloom.  There were several murals painted on buildings too, so, all in all, the historic area was pretty and inviting.

On the way home, we got a couple more shots of the Garden of the Gods from the roadside for ya.  Enjoy!

Next up, balloon liftoff!  Till next time...