Was at the Mesa Verde cliff dwellings and the ladder access felt weirdly modern

I visited the Cliff Palace site in Colorado last fall, and the metal ladders they have for tourists to climb down are bolted right into the ancient stone. It made me think about how much we physically change a site just to let people see it. Do you think that kind of access ruins the authenticity for future study?

4 comments

4 Comments

piper_williams19d ago

Yeah, the "bolted right into the ancient stone" part got me. I had a similar feeling seeing a modern walkway at Chaco Canyon, it just felt off.

nancy_smith19d ago

Read an article once about the tension between keeping a site safe for visitors and leaving it alone. They talked about a ruin in Greece where they put up a huge metal roof, and it just looked like a gas station canopy dropped from the sky. Sometimes the fix is worse than the problem.

dakotawood13d ago

Totally get that! Saw a glass elevator added to a historic library once and it just killed the vibe. Preservation can really miss the mark sometimes.

joelh6413d ago

That gas station canopy thing @nancy_smith mentioned is the perfect way to put it. Makes you wonder who signs off on these plans. Like, do they ever just step back and look at it? Is the goal just to keep people from tripping, or to actually keep the feeling of the place alive?