Step House - Two Villages, Six Centuries Apart

Photo: Ken Lund from Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0 (cropped)

A stop on Mesa Verde Cliff Dwellings, a free self-guided tour.

This is the one cliff dwelling you can walk into without a tour ticket. The Wetherill Mesa road is seasonal, roughly May to October, and the Step House trail opens only when a ranger is on duty, so check nps.gov before the long drive out.

The trail drops about 100 feet into an alcove that people used twice. In the 620s CE, Basketmaker families built pithouses here, homes dug partly into the ground. About 600 years later, around 1226, their descendants built a stone pueblo at the other end. You can see both, plus petroglyphs and the old stone staircase that gave the site its name.

This mesa is named for the Wetherill ranching family. In 1891 a young Swedish visitor, Gustaf Nordenskiold, excavated here with their help and shipped hundreds of objects home. Some ancestral remains he took were returned to the tribes for reburial after a 2019 agreement.

Long House, nearby, requires a ranger-tour ticket.

Getting here: Back at Far View, take the Wetherill Mesa Road west for 12 slow, winding miles (vehicles under 25 feet) and park at the Wetherill Mesa kiosk area.

Did you know?: Nordenskiold's 1893 book, with his photographs and maps, was the first scientific study of Mesa Verde and brought its cliff dwellings to wide attention.

Photo op: From the alcove, frame a reconstructed pithouse with the later stone rooms behind it.

Nearby: Restrooms and water at the Wetherill Mesa kiosk area in season; no food or fuel. Allow 45 minutes to an hour for the trail.

More on Wikipedia: Gustaf Nordenskiold · Basketmaker culture · Pit-house

Step House - Two Villages, Six Centuries Apart

Stops on this tour