TOWAOC - Though wildfires burned more than half of Mesa Verde National Park in the past decade, most of its famed cliff dwellings escaped serious damage, according to the latest results from the first comprehensive survey of those sites.
The southwestern Colorado park, near Cortez, is visited by about 500,000 people each year. Tourists are drawn mainly to the multistory masonry structures built in shady recesses, called alcoves, beneath overhanging sandstone cliffs.

Only a handful of the cliff dwellings are open to the public. But the 52,000-acre park contains nearly 600 of them, and rappelling park researchers are 10 years into an assessment of all of them.