Mesa Verde's Secret Garden: A History of Managing the Backcountry and Wilderness of a National Park

Mesa Verde National Park is the only congressionally designated land-based Wilderness to prohibit all recreational use. While backcountry use was encouraged for decades, stewardship changed over time as “gardening” the park for aesthetic purposes decreased while secrecy increased. The reasons for these changes, as Christopher Barns discovered, are multifaceted, but ultimately they reflect a desire to protect the park’s thousands of archaeological sites, including six hundred Ancestral Puebl...