Providing access to those ruins and keeping the highway passable has been a challenge for park officials ever since the park’s inception in 1906.

Before 1913, when the first entrance road was completed, it took visitors three days to make a round-trip visit to the park from the nearby town of Mancos on horses in a pack train. Automobiles made their first foray into the park on May 28, 1914, when a caravan of six cars made the round trip from Mancos into the park in one day.

The park has subsequently spent an estimated $50 million to $60 million building and repairing its present entrance road, Route 10, making the federal highway one of the most valuable pieces of real estate in Montezuma County. But the man responsible for maintaining the route says the money is well-spent.

"You know, any road needs maintenance, and any road’s maintenance is really expensive," explains Frank Cope, chief of maintenance at Mesa Verde. "For a park its size, it’s probably gotten its fair share of federal highway funds, but I don’t think it’s any more or less than others."

As long as cars and buses remain the main means of access for the hundreds of thousands of tourists who visit the park each year, the road will remain a funding priority.

"I don’t think the average resident living near a national park has any idea the potential the park has to change the community," explained Cope.

"You lose your road, all the people in town go hungry. It’s like any other physical asset in the valley, we’re going to spare no expense to keep it right. When it comes down to it, $3 million here and $4 million there is nothing compared to what it might be if the park was closed. You could lose that much in revenue in three days."

That theory has been tested at several points in the park’s history, when mudslides and road failures have forced the park to close for several weeks at a time.

In 1961, a year after the modern road was finished, the road failed, signaling a 20-year battle with slippery Mancos shale, steep slopes, floods, and fires.

In 1979, 2 1/2 miles into the park, 80,000 tons of material fell on the road, causing the park’s closure for 30 days. Another slide in the mid-1980s closed the park for several weeks and cost $7 million to repair.

The park just finished repairing a "bulging slope" at one of the steepest parts of the road, anchoring the side of the hill into place with concrete blocks and cables, and putting in an extensive drainage system.

And starting in 2003, the park will be improving five places on the main entrance road that are in danger of failing or in need of realignment.

All of this construction and reconstruction raises the question of whether tourists would have been better served with a road built from a different direction.

"A lot of people say, ‘You know, why was this road put here, it shouldn’t have been put here," but one of the things that people really don’t understand is that this is an archaeological park, but it is also a park that was set aside as a national park for its scenic vistas, and the highway furnishes the scenic vistas wherever they may be," explained Cope.

"There’s always been talk that it could come up from the south somehow, and that has always been a discussion. But you never know, even if that was done, whether the road would be any more stable coming up there. The fact of it is that this is a high mesa, and somehow regardless of where you come, you have to take a highway up the slope of the mesa," said Cope.

Since the park’s inception, the road has gone through three major realignments.

Early on, it traveled 2,500 feet from the entrance at the valley floor to the west side of the park’s highest point and across the length of the Knife Edge, a precarious section of road that skirted the top of Mesa Verde, revealing views of the Montezuma Valley and nearby mountain ranges before dipping into Prater Canyon and the interior of the park.

In the early ’20’s, a survey was done that recommended the road be moved east, toward the town of Mancos, approaching the park from an entirely different angle. It switchbacked up the "Big Hill" of the mesa and down into Morefield Campground.

Mancos resident Herman Wagner remembers traveling this road as a small child, riding in his father’s car.

"In those days it was mostly Model-T Fords, and cars of that vintage, and some of them even had to back up the road. If your fuel tank was in the back, you had to back up so that the gas would flow into your carburetor," remembers Wagner.

The famous Knife Edge Road terrorized early park visitors, with its steep drop-offs and slippery Mancos shale. It was originally a one-lane, dirt road with a telephone at the top and another at the bottom that drivers used to find out whether any other cars were on the road.

Though eventually improved and surfaced, it was abandoned in 1957 when the park drilled a hole through Prater Ridge, realigned the road around the east side of Point Lookout and built a road through Nussbaum Pass.

Historian Dwayne Smith of Durango is completing a history of visitor transportation to and into the park.

"Mesa Verde National Park is interesting because we see all the phases of transportation there. At one time they had stables, the Rio Grande Southern Railroad took tourists there — now we have automobiles, buses, and Frontier Airlines," said Smith.

Locating the entrance to Mesa Verde National Park between Cortez and Mancos was a critical boost to both towns’ economies.

"From the very first, it had a big impact on Cortez and Mancos," said Smith. "A lot of people came into the park, and a lot of people made good money up there when there weren’t a lot of good jobs. It took Cortez from a farming town to one that depends greatly on tourism."

In fact, the push for a road into Mesa Verde began before the turn of the century by local citizens.

"Unless our cliff-dwelling guides do something toward cutting a respectable trail over Mesa Verde toward the ruins, the people of this village will take the matter in hand, and not only make a good trail, but will erect guideboards with painted data thereon, thus doing away with necessity of guides from whom tourists gather little or no information," warned Mancos Times editor W.H. Kelly in the Sept. 18, 1896, edition.

Kelly worried about the comfort of traveling tourists, especially women. "Ladies do not like to dress like scarecrows, ride astride, and endanger sight and life from brush. With the use of a sharp hatchet on one day it would soon make that ride one of enjoyment."

Tourist satisfaction is still a point of concern, especially since growing numbers of tourists may hurt both the park’s archaeological resources and visitor experience.

The park asked 2,500 visitors to complete a survey this summer that included pictures of popular archaeological sites with a varied number of people in them.

Visitors were asked how "acceptable" the number of people pictured at the sites was.

The park has set capacities at several popular sites, but not for the whole park.

"If visitation continues to grow and grow, we’re going to be looking at setting capacities park-wide," predicted Patty Trap, the park’s planner.

The park is developing a first-ever park transportation plan, but Trap says mass-transportation systems such as gondolas, fixed tramways, and buses will all be on the table for consideration.

"The park service does not have any gondolas or fixed tramway systems in the nation," Trap said. "I’ve talked to enough people to know that it’s one of the issues that people tend to really support, or they are definitely against it. One of the major reasons they are against it is that they think it’s a Disneyification of our national-park system. And so the question is, is that an appropriate mode of travel for this or any of the other parks in the national-park system?"

The idea of a gondola surfaced in the 1970s and was resurfaced in almost every decade since. Although the entrance road would have to remain open, a gondola would reduce expensive maintenance costs.

"If you don’t have to maintain a highway to public health standards and are only using it for administrative functions, then your cost would drop dramatically," explained Cope.

The park is also working on plans to relocate its headquarters and artifacts from the park’s interior to its entrance, a plan that may protect resources from future forest fires, but one that has area residents worried about its impact on the local economy.

Some theorize that tourists may not stay as long in the area if they can simply walk through the park’s museum without making the lengthy trip up onto the mesa.

But for those who have seen the park change from one rarely visited to a popular tourist attraction, Mesa Verde will always remain a special place, no matter how visitors are transported to its cliff palaces.

Clay Bader, an 80-year-old Mancos resident with lifelong ties to Mesa Verde, said he’s in favor of a gondola. None of the changes the park has made, so far, he said, has dimmed his love of the site.

"I still enjoy going up to the park just like I did when I was a kid," he said.