Over the years the inevitable sandstone grit in their food wore at their teeth. By age 30, most of them had severe dental problems.

The climate, though benign enough to let them raise good summer crops, was cold in winter. The chill, combined with the hard surfaces they lived and slept on, often led to arthritis well before what we moderns would have considered middle age.

They were simple farmers who struggled in a marginal environment. Almost everything about their lives was struggle, although there were certainly enough warm days with plentiful food, peace, companionship and the absence of major illnesses to give them their own momentary version of the good life.

They started as nomads, then later settled under the sheltering cliffs of the Mesa Verde area of southwestern Colorado. Then, sometime in the 1300s, seemingly overnight,  after a thousand years living near the cliffs, these Anasazi – “old ones” – disappeared.

What they left behind them fascinated and amazed the people who settled the Colorado Plateau years later. For the Anasazi had constructed elaborate stone towns under the overhangs of great sandstone cliffs. Able to scan the terrain below for enemies, and relieved of fear of attack from above, they felt safe in their sheltered settlements. Their routine settled into farming corn and squash by day atop the mesas, or foraging for game, fish and wild plants along the watercourses beneath their villages, and then returning to the security of their stone aeries at night.

Over the years they expanded their settlements, building dozens of small stone towns in Mesa Verde, each one spreading to fill its shelf under a cliff. Some of them had hundreds of rooms, and towers that reminded the people who came long after them of apartment buildings in distant places like New York and Chicago.

Admiration for the Anasazis’ works led to creation of an 81-square mile national park in 1906 to protect them from vandalism and deterioration. Mesa Verde National Park became the first U.S. park dedicated to the preservation of the artifacts of a culture rather than a scenic wonder. The park has few stunning landscapes or natural marvels – the awe here is in looking across chasms at ghost towns that in slanting light often look as though they are made of gold.

In 1978, UNESCO named Mesa Verde a World Heritage Site, the first U.S. location to be so designated.

Since the park is small, it’s easy to cover its high points in a day or two, lingering at each and not feeling any pressure to cover ground. The most magnificent ruin is Cliff Palace, the “signature” image of the park, with its soaring towers (one four stories high), 217 living and storage rooms, 23 ceremonial kiva pits and public areas. This is the ghost town that draws the most visitors.

Other well-known sites include Long House, the second largest cliff dwelling, Spruce Tree House (114 rooms), and Wetherill Mesa, the park’s quietest corner, the site where many of the park’s most recent discoveries of smaller settlements has taken place.

The park has some drawbacks: as wondrous a place as it is for students, children and anybody generally interested in archaeology, Mesa Verde is a hard place for the disabled. Some dwellings are simply inaccessible to the disabled, given the limits of technology and federal laws that forbid extensive alteration of national park landscapes in order to provide greater access. Visitors should check out beforehand those tours and park attractions that do accommodate disabled travelers.

Mesa Verde’s location makes it a springboard to (or a side trip from) Durango, CO, the southern terminus of the “Million Dollar Highway,” a scenic drive through the San Juan Mountains that some say is one of the 10 most scenic drives in the world.