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Mesa Verde National Park Volunteer Opportunities
Mesa Verde's community volunteers contribute to the park's success in a variety of ways including visitor services, trail and landscape maintenance, special events, education, and data entry. A few of these are described here, you can learn of others by contacting us, and several exciting ones are still to be suggested; the opportunities to help are limited primarily by the number of volunteers, their available time, and their creativity and interests.
Imagine yourself as a volunteer in one of the activities listed below -- or, think about other ways your unique skills and talents can help the park with its two-fold mission of preservation and education.
Daily Activities
Visitors arriving at the Park pay entry fees at a kiosk near Highway 160; there they receive information encouraging them to stop at the Visitor Center about 15 miles into the park. Besides being a center for displays about the park, the VC is the only place where visitors can buy tickets for ranger-guided tours of three of the Park's most visited sites.
Many of these visitors -- both English speaking and the large number of non-English speakers -- arrive at the VC with very little information about what is available and how best to use their time to get the most from our park. Often they've been told only that they should stop at Mesa Verde.
That's where VIP's (Volunteers in the Park) working at the VC come in. We can help visitors plan their visits to the park and the surrounding region by discussing, both in words and photos, the ranger-guided and self-guided tours; answering questions about the park and the local attractions, such as the Anasazi Heritage Center in Cortez and the Narrow Gauge Train in Durango; suggesting tours best suited to their interests and physical capabilities; and giving them a friendly "local" who knows the park. We help them understand what they'll see and how it fits into their southwest experience.
Many visitors later make a point of stopping to thank us for improving their park experience and adding to their vacations. "Thanks for showing me those pictures of Balcony House; without that picture of its 32 foot ladder, I might've bought a ticket and still be stuck halfway up."
Often visitors arrive first at Cliff Palace, the park's largest and most frequently visited alcove site, planning to walk through by themselves or at the least buy tour tickets there. Volunteers selling water and greeting guests at the Museum Association's Water Stand above the alcove are then the first park personnel to greet these often disappointed visitors, and it's our job either to break the bad news that they must drive back to the VC if they want to purchase tour tickets or to help them plan alternatives. In these cases we end up doing the Visitor Center job -- helping them understand the park and decide what to see, identifying and suggesting appropriate activities that will interest them.
For those who do have tour tickets, the important task of selling them water is but one of our functions; we discuss what to expect on the Cliff Palace or Balcony House tours; answer questions about the park and the local area; handle emergencies ("I just locked my keys in my car!" or "I'm having trouble catching my breath."); and be ambassadors for the park and the four corners.
Volunteers who are in the park without a specific assignment (before or after a VC or Water Stand tour, for example) can greet visitors and answer questions at Far View Sites. Visitors who want information about mesa-top dwellings frequently stop at this well marked area, where we answer questions about the architecture, the reservoir, the five communities, and other similar sites that can be viewed in and around Mesa Verde. This often is often our best opportunity to tell the detailed story of the ancestral puebloan culture.
Regular Activities
The activities associated with the park's horses vary with the interests and available time for rangers and the condition of the horses. In addition to helping in their care, volunteers have in the past enjoyed taking the horses through Morefield Campground, where they are natural ice breakers for shy children or overwhelmed adults and are able to overcome any language barrier. Volunteers help with maintenance and exercise of park horses, interact with visitors, and at times survey back country in the company of a Ranger.
Trail captains can "adopt" one of the park's hiking trails, monitoring for problems and reporting them to the park's maintenance staff, documenting the status of native and exotic seasonal plants, and interacting with park visitors.
Volunteers also help maintain Spruce Canyon and Petroglyph Point Trails on a regular basis or as part of special work days. Routine maintenance includes clearing brush and other growth intruding into the paths, suggesting changes for drainage, removing modern graffiti, and assessing the trail's overall condition. Trail captains coordinate the efforts when other volunteers are needed to help on their trails.
In spite of our dry climate, both native and exotic (read, "weeds") plants thrive at Mesa Verde, especially, it seems, in the most-frequently-visited public areas. Yucca plants especially like to intrude into public walkways, spiking unsuspecting visitors. A dedicated group of volunteers helps manage the environment by encouraging the growth of native plants and removing the overgrowth of non-native intruders.
Much of this work is done by individuals, sometimes after a stint at the Visitor Center; other times groups are organized and supervised by park staff during designated Volunteer Work Days. One favorite and rewarding activity in both 2008 and 2010 was reviving the original paths near the Rec Hall and the Research Facility. These paths were built in the 1930's by the members of the Civilian Conservation Corps who, among other tasks, built the buildings at the Headquarters Area.
The Maintenance Staff works year round to repair and improve buildings; grounds; picnic areas; electrical, water, and HVAC systems; signs; etc. in the park. As in other areas, time and staff are limited; and frequently volunteers who are willing to work regularly or intermittently can help with ongoing or special projects. In 2007, for example, two dedicated volunteers repaired and refreshed the signage in the park; in 2008, several (including those same two) helped staff rebuild 25 of the parks nearly 100 picnic tables. Volunteers who have been trained by park staff are frequently called on to remove carved grafitti from sandstone rocks.
The Natural Resources staff works to study and document the park's natural resources and to protect them from park visitors -- in the form of invasive plant species, wandering feral ponies and other non-native animals, and intrusive or destructive human visitors. The park's acreage is great; the park's funding is small; and the Natural Resources staff are unable to keep up with all that needs to be done. Volunteers help them in collecting and archiving data.
Education is one of the park's most critical functions. Both seasonal and full-time Interpretative Rangers help park visitors to understand what archaeologists and anthropologists believe about the culture, architecture, life styles and activities, diets and physical attributes, and environment of the ancestral puebloans who thrived at Mesa Verde continually for about 700 years. Many of the education modules used in the park were developed by VIP's who work side by side with the rangers.
But the education mission reaches beyond the park boundary fence. Colorado students study the State's history and, of course, its prehistory at several grade levels. VIP's help this effort by developing and implementing education outreach programs for schools and other groups -- during the park's centennial year 2006, volunteers recommended, developed, and conducted child-focused hands-on programs that are still used on special event days and at the Visitor Center.
Mesa Verde's community volunteer program itself needs your help. Volunteers administer the program themselves, interfacing with the park's professional staff, creating new opportunities, arranging valuable training experiences, coordinating schedules for the daily activities at the Visitor Center and Cliff Palace Kiosk, helping volunteers develop programs that suit their unique interests, and much, much more. As the opportunities have expanded and the number and expressed interests of committed volunteers have grown, the work has increased as well.
The two volunteer Volunteer Coordinators continue to oversee the program and do much of the day to day work mentioned above. Other volunteers have assumed responsibility for pieces that particularly interest them. This website is an example, created by and maintained by two volunteers with special talent and interest. Others have begun coordinating the program of stewardship of the hiking trails in the park; interfacing with the Maintenance Department to organize work days and assist with special projects; researching, organizing, and offering programs with the park's solar telescope; coordinating data entry with the Natural Resources department; and working with landscapers to develop and maintain the park's grounds.
Think about how you'd like to be involved, and let us know!
Special ActivitiesThrough the year several individual opportunities arise for volunteers. The park has programs on many of the summer holidays, all of which require volunteer support. The community volunteer program organizes several work days focused on single activities -- things like trail maintenance and improvement, picnic table repair, barn improvements, etc. -- and we conduct regular training activities during the year focused on details or unique aspects of the park that are not normally available to the public. And every December we work along side the park staff to present for our local communities the park open house, complete with the awesome luminaria paths down to the lantern-lighted Spruce Tree House.
