Mesa Verde is Spanish for Green Table. As the name implies, the mesa is lush with vegetation relative to the sparse country surrounding it. Because of the favorable climate and soil, Ancestral Puebloans, also know as the Anasazi, inhabited the mesa for about 700 years. Today archeologists are studying the over 4700 sites on the mesa.
A small group of us, under Ranger Lee's guidance, hiked down to one of the Anasazi dwellings.