Cliff Palace: Mesa Verde National Park

We wanted to tour the famous Cliff Palace on our first trip to Mesa Verde National Park.

We had planned to go to Mesa Verde earlier during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, but Mesa Verde was closed for some of that time and, even when the general park was opened again, Cliff Palace tours were closed for a while.

As coronavirus became better managed, Cliff Palace tours were not avaiable for a period of time due to construction on the Cliff Palace Loop Road.

Even when Cliff Palace tours became available again, obtaining a ticket to one of these tours was not necessarily a straightforward task. Tickets can be reserved from the recreation.gov site starting two weeks before the day for which tickets are desired and they go really quickly in the summer. However, we were able to reserve tickets for our late September tour of Cliff Palace more easily. Once, we had the Cliff Palace tour reserved, we built the remainder of the road trip to Mesa Verde around that reserved tour.

Because we stayed in the Far View Lodge the night before our full day in Mesa Verde, we were able to get to the Cliff Palace overlook before many other people had even entered the park.

Although we really enjoyed the Cliff Palace tour and recommend it, I was pleasantly surprised at how good the view is of Cliff Palace from the overlook.

The morning sun behind Cliff Palace (from the observation deck perspective) made it more challenging to take photographs.

We had the observation deck for Cliff Palace to ourselves for a while, but the group of participants for the guideded tour started arriving and the platform got quite a bit busier.

Several rangers and park workers were part of the tour. The first provided an overview to us while on the observation deck and then allowed us to start descending the stairs.

There was also a vertical ladder to climb into the Cliff Palace area from the trail.

Seeing Cliff Palace from roughly the same level (rather than from above) provided a different perspective.

Walking up close to Cliff Palace made it easier to see some interesting details that are not as obvious from further away (it didn't hurt that one of the rangers was pointing out these things to us!).

When the Cliff Palace tour ended, we started ascending via stone stairs.

The ascent became more interesting as we climbed through increasingly narrow spaces between huge boulders.

The ascent finishes with two short ladders.

We loved seeing Cliff Palace in the quiet morning before others started arriving and we loved the tour, but we wanted to return in the late afternoon when the sun would be behind us instead of in front of us.

Seeing and walking in front of Cliff Palace at Mesa Verde allowed us to experience something that we've been wanting to see for a long time and it was even more remarkable to see in person than we had anticipated.