Station 5. Spruce Tree House 700 years ago was a thriving village. If you could have visited it you would have seen women busily cooking over firepits in the courtyards, others grinding corn, weaving baskets or making pottery. Men who were not tending their mesa-top fields might have been building a new room, making or mending their tools or performing an age-old ceremony in one of the kivas. You would have seen children playing and old people resting against the low wall across the front of the dwelling as they basked in the warm sun dreaming of their younger days. There would also be dogs and turkeys wandering through the village and picking over the trash dump for bits to eat. Unfortunately, this all came to an end shortly before A.D. 1300. [Illustration: uncaptioned] Compare the illustration with the dwelling to locate the following: A. These are doorways. Some are T-shaped, some are rectangular, but we don’t know why the two types. Notice that some of the doorways were closed with stone slabs. B. These original timbers supported a balcony as well as the floors in the rooms. Balconies made it easy to get into the upper rooms. Balconies and rooftops were reached by ladders. C. Most of the cooking was done outside in the courtyards over firepits like this one. Very few of the rooms had firepits in them. D. This was a storage bin made of sandstone slabs. E. The courtyard was the scene of most of the daily activities—grinding corn, preparing food, making tools, pottery, etc. F. The ladders lead to kivas beneath the courtyard. These ladders and kiva roofs have been restored. [Illustration: _Spruce Tree House from the north end_] Station 6. The cliff dwelling was named Spruce Tree House by the ranchers who first discovered it in 1888. A large tree which they misidentified as a spruce tree was found growing against the cliff right in front of the dwelling. It is said that the men first entered the ruin by climbing down this tree. This is a good place to take a picture. IF YOU HAVE NOT PURCHASED THIS BOOKLET PLEASE LEAVE IT IN THE BOX BY THE TRAIL AS YOU LEAVE. IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO KEEP IT, PLEASE DROP 10 CENTS IN THE COIN BOX. Thank you. GENERAL INFORMATION Spruce Tree House is the third largest cliff dwelling in Mesa Verde National Park. It is located in Spruce Tree Canyon, a branch of the much larger Navajo Canyon. The cave, which is really a very large overhang, was formed by flaking or spalling of the cliff above a small seep-spring, and by freezing and thawing during the winter. There is no evidence that the Indians tried to shape or enlarge the caves; to do so would have been a tremendous task with their primitive tools.