I’ve always been a national park junkie. I love visiting them and you’d be right to guess that I have one of those little passport folios where you can collect dated stamps from each park. Our new home in southwestern Colorado is on the doorstep of Mesa Verde National Park which I now call “my” park.” It is marvelous to be able to get there in a matter of minutes any time I want to.
Mesa Verde is a park devoted to antiquities. It was created to preserve the marvelous archaeological sites that exist there. And since it is a national park, we can visit and learn from the rangers and if we’re lucky from the native people who love it most because it is part of their homeland.
The tallest ladder on any tour I’ve been on. This is the Balcony House tour and this ladder is 30 feet tall.
I have relished the ability to go on tours of all the cliff dwellings they’ll let the public into. Not all the tours are for the faint of heart like the Balcony House tour that requires you to climb a 30 foot ladder, but most are fairly accessible if you can do stairs and have good balance.
I am particularly captivated by the walls that are still standing. Made of stones that were shaped by harder stones, the amount of work to create these dwellings is unimaginable.
And then there are the older dwellings on the mesa top, some of which have been excavated and preserved for us to visit.
Square Tower House at Mesa Verde National Park
And of course there are hikes among the piñon-juniper forest, the petroglyphs, the birds, and the viewpoints that allow a 360 degree glimpse of my county and all the way south past Shiprock into New Mexico.
Balcony House at Mesa Verde National Park. This is one of the cliff dwellings you can tour (but don’t forget that ladder!)
I think it is easy to be fascinated by the people who used to live here especially if this is the place you also call home. Modern humans and many archaeologists have not treated the Ancestral Puebloans well and the parks are still working on being open to learning from the descendants of these people who are still here. I’m always heartened to go on a tour and hear the rangers answer many questions with, “We don’t know,” or even better, “That isn’t our knowledge to hold. It belongs to native people.”
My current personal work continues to contain a lot of references to time as expressed by rocks, geology, and the abandoned structures and rock art of the Ancestral Puebloans which are all over the Colorado Plateau. I’ll talk more about this in future posts, but here is one such piece which was in the American Tapestry Biennial 15 last year.
Rebecca Mezoff, Unconformity Series: Clarity, 24 x 42 inches, hand-dyed wool, cotton, 2025
I enjoy seeing the hand of the maker in the walls at Mesa Verde. There are remnants of plaster in places and it is interesting to look at the walls and imagine them all decorated. I also love looking at the rock patterns. These chinking patterns are particularly interesting to me. The use of our hands is a uniquely human thing. The intensive making that built these homes must have brought the same satisfaction as creating the tapestries I make at my looms.
Mesa Verde National Park, chinking stones. These walls were probably covered with a layer of colored plaster.
Some of you in Summer of Tapestry will remember a tapestry I wove about similar walls at Hovenweep National Monument (also in my county!). The sketch tapestry prompt was Light.
The importance of public lands
All public lands are important and the western USA is full of them. The protected lands in the area of the country I live in are incredibly important to native tribes as these are their homelands. The current federal administration has been relentlessly destroying our public lands and this is something we need to pay attention to. How will we have places to take our children to if they’re all demolished to gain a few months of extraction? Archaeological sites hundreds and thousands of years old cannot be replaced and we will literally be losing history the more these places are destroyed. Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments were recently decreased by 90% leaving countless gorgeous and historically relevant places unprotected. We not only need to reverse this, but we need to protect these places in ways that can’t be turned around by executive order.
On Dec 31, 2025 I went to the park and purchased a new annual pass even though I could use mine for one more month. Why? Because the 2026 passes have the face of the current president of the USA and George Washington on them in violation of the law that says the passes have to have an image of nature from the parks.
These are places that are open to the public for many uses and they are an endless source of artistic inspiration. Please lend your voice to the fight to save our public lands and the jobs/work of public servants who protect them.
What public lands do you have near your home? Do you have national parks in your country? Other land understood to be protected by an entity for public use? Have you been to those places and do they inspire your artwork?