Badger House Community

Badger House Community is a group of four excavated village sites on Wetherill Mesa, linked by an interpreted paved-and-graveled walking and biking route. You move between pithouses and mesa-top room blocks, with signs explaining what you are looking at. The full route is 2.25 miles round trip. If the cliff dwellings have you curious about daily life on the mesa, this is the stop to add.

The sites represent about 600 years of Ancestral Pueblo life. The first stop is a Modified Basketmaker pithouse dated to AD 650. At the Developmental Pueblo village, rooms that began as above-ground storage grew into three-room homes around AD 750. Those rooms were likely used in summer, with people returning to better-insulated pithouses for winter.

At Badger House, the tower, kiva, and final room block are dated to 1258. A tunnel about 32 feet long joined the kiva and tower. The kiva burned, and evidence of that fire extends roughly 20 feet into the tunnel, leaving a small but vivid trace of what happened here.

Two Raven House was occupied at different times from the 900s into the 1100s. Posts and brush partly enclosed its plaza; the reason is uncertain. The enclosure may have sheltered the plaza from wind or kept turkeys in or out. Pinyon-juniper woodland grows over deep, well-watered soil here, and the area around Badger House was some of the mesa's best farmland. That links the village story to the work of growing food.

All four sites require walking or biking from Wetherill Pavilion. The route is relatively level to three sites, then climbs a steep hill to the fourth. Wetherill Mesa is a summer-season area reached by a 12-mile, very winding drive from the park entrance, which usually takes 30 to 45 minutes. Bikes can be ridden on trails beyond the pavilion, not on Wetherill Road. Summer thunderstorms and lightning are common at this 7,240-foot mesa; outside your car, the pavilion and the Badger House shelters are the places to get out of a storm.