Garden of the Gods – Manitou Cliff Dwellings

(AF Academy, Colorado Springs, CO)  Hi 75  Lo 55 – Warning... there’s going to be a lot of photos in today’s blog! Today was another special day. We’d heard so much from our RV’ing friends about the beauty of Garden of the Gods, and we were looking forward to visiting there today. We were surprised to learn how close the park is to Colorado Springs. It’s only about five miles from downtown.


Garden of the Gods is a park about four times the size of New York’s Central park, and features dramatic sandstone spires that were carved out of the earth over 300 million years. The land was given to the city of Colorado Springs in 1909 by the children of Charles Perkins, with the stipulation that the park would forever be open to the public for free.

We spent an hour or so at the Garden of the Gods Nature Center, where we saw a short movie about how the park was formed. We had a bite of lunch on the patio, which offered this beautiful view of the entrance road to the park.


It’s about a 7-mile drive through the park, with a couple of parking areas where you can access the many paved walking trails that wander through the park and give you an up close view of the spires and rock formations. We parked at the main parking area and walked about a one-mile loop. It was, in a word, breathtaking! Little commentary is required, so I’ll just let some photos speak for themselves. (Click on photos to enlarge them.)









There were a few brave (and fit) souls who were putting on quite a demonstration of rock climbing. You have to register to climb the rocks, and you’re required to have the proper rock-climbing equipment. A couple of these are hard to see, so be sure to click on the photos to make them larger.










More photos. Believe me when I say, it was even more beautiful in person!






















The most popular spot in the park is “Balanced Rock.” It’s a rock formation that has a column topped by a large rock that’s precariously balanced over the roadway.




It was an easy climb up to the ledge you see to the right in the photos above, to get another angle of the rock.


Someday that sucker’s going to topple over. I hope there’s no cars on the road below when it happens.

After over-dosing on “ooh’s” and “ahh’s” we exited the park on U.S. 24 in Manitou Springs and drove for a couple of miles to visit the Manitou Cliff Dwellings and Museum. They are authentic Anasazi cliff dwellings dating 800 to 1,000 years old.




These dwellings were originally located in the southwest corner of Colorado near Mesa Verde. They were un-preserved and deteriorating due to vandalism and squatters. William Crosby, the original owner/founder of the Manitou Cliff Dwellings Ruins Company, wanted to preserve and protect these dwellings from looters. His company spent many months mapping out a blueprint of the dwellings at their original site. Then he got special permission to relocate the dwellings to Phantom Canyon, later renamed Cliff Canyon, in Manitou Springs. From 1904 to 1907 the the ruins were slowly dismantled stone by stone, packaged, and finally moved by oxen from their original site to Dolores, Colorado. There, they were loaded and shipped by railroad to Colorado Springs, and finally brought to Cliff Canyon by horse and wagon. Crosby’s men then, following the blueprints, reassembled the dwellings in dimension and appearance as they found them. So these are the original dwellings, just not in their original place.




You can walk inside the dwellings to see how the Anasazi Indians lived hundreds of years ago. They were empty, but it was quite interesting to see the sizes and shapes of the rooms that the families lived in back then.

It was another fantastic day! The sights just seem to get better and better. Tomorrow we’re taking a break from all this fun and spending our usual Sunday at home. But we have another week to go. Can we stand it?  :)