Mesa Verde is a fascinating place. With COVID going on, the close-up/ranger-led tours are closed. But there’s still a lot to see, and the park was practically empty, which we loved. Several trails available, and you can get close to many of the sites.
It’s sort of an odd place in that the visitor center and the park entrance are about an hour’s drive to the sites (the drive is beautiful, of course).
The Park is massive, with thousands of discovered archeological sites.
The area was inhabited for hundreds of years (roughly something like AD800 to AD1500) but the cliff dwellings were at the end of that period, and only were occupied for 150 years or so. The cliffs were abandoned, and no one knows (really) what happened to the people.
Petroglyphs:
One of the cliff dwellings:
the tallest tower in the park: