When I stood ... (continued from Everett's Mesa Verde)

When I stood at the bottom of Square Tower House (called Square House Tower by Everett Ruess) and looked back at the famous overlook, where most people view the site,  I couldn't help but think of Everett Ruess looking down -- feeling inspired to create what I think is one of his best block prints.

Square House Tower and Crow's Nest by Nate Thompson

 Square House Tower is the tallest of Mesa Verde National Park's ancient Puebloan (Anasazi) structures and is closed to the public. It is four stories high. Most of the floors are still intact and the walls are painted with bands of bright white and red clay.

I got a chance to see the site first hand in 2003. It was a dream come true because of my love of Everett Ruess country. However, my dream visit evolved when I saw the site's Crow's Nest.

Sitting a dozen yards up and over -- from the front of the site's tower -- the Crow's nest is wedged into a crevasse. It looks as though it will fall at any moment. Surprisingly, the archaeologist who took me to Square Tower said she actually visited the Nest and collected samples of its plastered walls.

The result of my visit that day: I fell in love with ancient Puebloan plaster. It is an integral part of Mesa Verde's "Hidden Landscape" (the unwanted name of my wife's book about Mesa Verde's development as a park). And most visitor's to this an other Puebloan sites don't or can't appreciate it.

The plastered walls Everett may have seen in Mesa Verde are probably long gone. The multi-layered painted surfaces -- some 50 layers thick in some pueblos -- are vanishing during our lifetime.

The Crow's Nest by Nate Thompson

Sometimes my wife jokes like Ronald Reagan and says "if you've seen one Pueblo, you've seen them all." Her response mocks his comment about redwoods. That's when I respond: "What Pueblo?" (Another Reagan joke: He made a similar statement before popping a grape in his mouth after being asked California's famous grape boycott).

What Everett Ruess do people see when they think of Square House Tower or Long House? Are there any journal entries about Everett at Mesa Verde? Surely, a CCC employee would have written something about the novelty of the stranger who stayed in their bunk house?

I proposed offering a special tour called "Everett's Mesa Verde" when I worked as a ranger at the park in 2009. I didn't push the idea very hard because one of my criticism's the books I read about Everett is that, inevitably, the books turn to telling the author's own story.