10/3/18 The Cliff Dwellings

   I spend half of each "work" day at the Contact Station and the other half in the Cliff Dwellings.  
The dwellings were built around 800 years ago, but the caves themselves have been used as shelters by people for thousands of years. Here's some photos and information about the caves and the dwellings.

The Caves are numbered from 1 - 7.  In the floor of Cave 1 are these three fire pits. They were recreated by people in the 1940s. This cave is very shallow. That, and the remains of these three fire pits, lead scientists to conclude that this cave was a cooking space, not a living space.

These "walls" in Cave 1 enclose two small spaces that scientists say were used for storage. The spaces between the "bricks" are "doors." 

In the background of Cave 1, you can see two vertical walls. Look at the bricks in the foreground.
The way that they are laying indicates a wall that fell down.

This is Cave 2. You can only see it from the outside. That 't-shaped' opening is a door. No one knows why it is 't-shaped,' but other ancient pueblo peoples did build t-shaped doors in their dwellings so perhaps that information was exchanged and then the Cliff Dwellers built t-shaped doorways. 

The other openings in the wall are for ventilation.  That tree trunk sticking out of the wall could have been part of a wooden balcony below the t-shaped doorway. Perhaps the cave dwellers had a ladder on the balcony that they put down to let in visitors and pulled up for safety.

There is a little walk from Cave 2 to Cave 3. 

To get into Cave 3 you have to go up several stone stairs and then a set of wooden stairs. See how the entry to Cave 3 is through a stove arch with wooden trunks sticking out near the top? Scientists have taken core samples of those tree trunks and determined that they were cut down around 1260.
That dates the buildings to around 1260 then. As you enter Cave 3, you feel a very strong cool breeze that comes up the canyon.

The trail in Cave 3 goes past these rooms. If you look carefully, you can see a u-shaped fireplace on the floor of this room. You can also see the ventilation hole in the wall. (The National Monument people puts rocks in the ventilation opening to keep people from climbing into this room.)

This is the view of the canyon from Cave 3.

Visitors walk on this trail to get from Cave 3 to Cave 4. The stairs lead down to the ladder that visitors use to leave Cave 4.

This square building is in Cave 4. It is the only two-story building in the dwellings. It also has walls built up to the cave roof. The walls in the other rooms don't go up to the ceiling because the builders wanted the smoke from the campfires to be able to escape. You can see a smoke hole above the opening in this building. It's possible that the bottom room of this dwelling was used for storage.

This ladder in Cave 4 allows visitors to look inside the rooms. Next to the ladder, you can see a curved wall. There are only a few curved walls in the dwellings. Scientists don't know why. The people who built these dwellings were here for 20 - 40 years and then they moved on. Scientists don't know why the cliff dwellers came here, or why they left. They estimate that there were 8 - 10 families, or 40 - 80 people who lived here and built these dwellings. The source of the rocks and mortar have not been found. 

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This is the ladder that leads down to the trail below Cave 4.

One way to exit Cave 4 is down this ladder. The other way is to retrace your steps to Cave 2 and walk down the wooden steps..

This is what you see after you go down the ladder: a big hollow cave underneath the square two-story building!

This pictograph is on the wall of Cave 5. It was already here when the cliff dwellers came.


These corncobs are about 800 years old! If you look at them carefully you will see that there a different sized cobs. That probably means that the Cliff Dwellers experimented with pollination to produce larger cobs!


In Cave 5 there is this weird u-shaped room with vertical beams! What is that about?

The trail ends in Cave 5, but if you look carefully at the cave at the end of the trail you will see this unusual pictograph. Scientists say that there are over 30 pictographs in the cave! Unfortunately from the trail, we can only see this one.

Looking across the canyon from Cave 5, we can see the mesa top where the Cave Dwellers might have planted corn. Scientists have found some irrigation blocks on this mesa top and in the valley.

Cave 6 has collapsed, but there is evidence of a bench in the back of the cave.

Cave 7 was never occupied.