Home. That’s the space between earth and sky.

Share the philosophy and the beauty of such a home on a glorious holiday among Ancestral Puebloan people in America’s West, highly possible thanks to Mesa Verde National Park and its neighbors.

 Farms, gardens, orchards and ranches of Cortez, Colorado and nearby communities connected me to the people living in these canyons, mesas, mountains and rolling sage plains a thousand years ago.

Tessie Naranjo says they’re still here, those ancestors, living in the mesas for seven centuries, from 550 – 1300 AD.

“We are them. We have not gone away. I feel their presence,” Naranjo softly says.

I did too, perhaps because I was trying and surely because I started my three-day visit in the Anasazi Heritage Center in Dolores.

That’s the place to open doorways to your soul if you want to make this vacation as deep and meaningful as it is stunningly beautiful.

Two million artifacts, maybe more, are what this center draws on to create experiences for visitors like me wanting to understand the ancestors before I set foot on their land.

    That translates to fragile items behind glass, hi-tech small screens recreating ancient crafts and trades, rock art and painting on stucco, pots of many sizes and functions, maps and photographs, timelines for perspective.

“Visit with Respect” is the nine-minute video that includes Tessie Naranjo, touching my heart with a desire to express thanks to the ancients.

Their artifacts, pieces of lives lived, were retrieved before the creation of McPhee Reservoir.  Archeologists spent seven years doing so.

I walked a paved wheelchair-accessible path half a mile above the Anasazi Heritage Center to look across McPhee, a big view of water, land and mountains.  Simple info signs along the way.

Worth walking to the top for the 360-degree view that includes Sleeping Ute Mountain. Legend says he’s a great warrior god who fell into a deep sleep and will awaken one day to help his people.

Escalante Pueblo is up top too, my first of many family rooms and ancient community gathering spaces to see in Mesa Verde Country.

The people living in them used to be called the Anasazi but their descendents today prefer Ancestral Puebloan.    

More sure-footed than I, considering the cliff dwellings I saw up close and personal in Mesa Verde National Park.    

Tiny finger and footholds in these cliffs for scrambling up and down, surely with water pots, just-hunted deer and the Seven Sisters on their shoulders.

That’s beans, squash and corn — agricultural staples then and now. Special feature of this southwest corner of Colorado: ancestral crop-growing lifestyle visible in rich archeological sites and dozens of family farms, ranches, gardens and orchards to eat, sleep, tour and lend a hand most any day.

I hiked trails and paved paths, climbed ladders down into ancient kivas and up out of cliff dwellings and gazed across canyons and mesas in Mesa Verde National Park, America’s first World Heritage Site.

In the Park I imagined the Ancestral Puebloans, and strained to hear their whispers.  Cliff dwellers moved elsewhere around 1,300, less than 100 years after shaping their sandstone homes.

 Outside the Mesa Verde Park gates — and that means down a long, winding, breathtaking road — I sat at kitchen tables with families delighted to be growing sustainable, manageable crops in places they can share with visitors.

“Touch the past, touch the plenty” is a slogan I heard a lot in Mesa Verde Country.

National Park Service and Bureau of Land Management excellence and abundance I expected, and found.

Local sustainable agricultural tourism with farm gates and family homes really open to visitors surprised me.

Agritourism is hard to pull off and farmers are the first to explain why it doesn’t work so well many places.

Here it does work. Maybe it’s the continuous culture. These farms are personal places, receptive to trendy new ideas that really are old ones.

I heard a lot about local, sustainable, functional, native, free range, pesticide free, heirloom.

Thirty-nine functioning farms and ranches are listed in a brochure with phone numbers, hours, addresses and web sites. Six more addresses list farm market schedules.

Local food shapes the menu at Metate, the fine restaurant on top of Mesa Verde National Park.

How high? 9,200 feet. View from my room at the Far View Lodge? Abundant stars at night, big views in the morning.

Trout for my dinner was dusted with blue corn and pine nuts, and prickly pear flavored the crème brulee. Chardonnay from Guy Drew Vineyards, and also a big red to go with my boar sliders.

“Ingredients within our menu represent the first agriculturalists here,” says Metate manager Steve Shampaine.

Since I learned in the Park Museum that Navajo people believe they were here since the beginning of time, this is a dinner place with depth.

 Abundant choices for experiencing the Park’s 5,200 acres and 5,000 archeological sites.

Ranger guided or solo. Half day or many. Paved paths or challenging hikes. Biodiesel tram or twilight tours. Lodge or camping.

Pop in and out of your own vehicle along the Mesa Top Loop Trail, six miles with short walks on paved paths to a dozen views of cliff dwellings, pithouses and canyons with easy-reading signs to learn a bit about each.

Make a $3 reservation at the Far View Visitor Center for ranger-guided tours of Cliff Palace, Balcony House or Long House. And be ready to climb steep stairs and ladders for the reward of being inside the living spaces of the Ancestral Puebloan people.

Unpaved trails are the route I took to Far View, 50 villages in a half square mile on a mesa top, 7,700 feet above sea level.

Stark contrast to the cliff dwellings. Glad I had two quarters for the brochure to make sense of what I was seeing at the two-story Far View House and Pipe Shrine House.

Walking a little further, I was lucky the sego lilies, wild larkspur and Indian paintbrush were blooming on the path to Coyote Village.

Fewer people traipse here so I was quiet, listening for ancient voices, seeing ground-floor rooms, tunnels connecting them and five kivas.

Some say these round rooms were ceremonial and others suggest family gathered in the kivas for winter warmth or communal chores, perhaps weaving.      

Fifty people might have lived here in A.D. 1000. Mattered to me that I was seeing their wooden beams and block walls, the mano and metate stones where they ground corn.

Staying longer at Mesa Verde National Park would have suited me fine, but so did yearning to see more of this Colorado part of Four Corners.

That’s why the drive to Hovenweep National Monument and Canyon of the Ancients happened.

Some places I go the drives are a burden, but here the distances are gifts with grand views.

 Deserted valley is what Hovenweep means in the Ute/Paiute language. Start this National Park Service archeological visit with the video and take a short walk for an overview of towers built on the canyon rim and isolated boulders.

Allow hiking time to get closer to the stonework.  Either way, Hovenweep is quiet, a place to contemplate the people of the early 1200s and wonder how they changed their nomad life to become cultivators of corn, staying put for a while.

Gotta sleep sometime. I treasured one night in the National Park Lodge and stayed two in the Cortez downtown Best Western. Perfectly fine.

 Connect to the land at the Canyon of the Ancients Guest Ranch, a 2,000-acre working farmstead with four guest cabins. Help if you like or just visit with Garry and Ming Adams and enjoy their art and furnishings. I found it on my drive to Hovenweep.

Connect to the peace of this vast place at Willowtail Springs in Mancos. The innkeepers Peggy and Lee Cloy live on the grounds, gardening, painting, practicing Tai Chi, birding, incorporating family heirloom furniture and elegant linens into cottages on the lake and in view of the LaPlata Mountain Range.

I saw a lot and missed a lot, seems to me. My stops were all on the Trail of the Ancients scenic byway, but so is much more.

Dreaming about a return. My challenge will be also wanting to drive the 232-mile San Juan Skyway and exploring Silverton, Durango, Ouray and maybe Telluride.