The Park Service opened Square Tower on 1 September 2011 to limited visits of 10 people a day, three days a week, for six weeks, after being closed to the public for 75 years. We were in the first group to visit the site. After this limited opportunity, it will once again be closed to the public. It was an exceptional opportunity, and a trip we'll remember forever... This deflector wall is comprised of small logs embedded in the rock floor, and uses mortar to hold it together. Perhaps the people found an easier, less work-intensive way to build them, compared to the wall in the photo below. Notice that the deflector wall in this kiva is comprised of solid rocks, stacked one upon the other. Contrast this approach to the deflector wall in the photo above. Most deflector walls in Mesa Verde are of solid stone construction. Archaeologists are still exploring this site, as evidenced by the ladders. The stone in the middle of the photo is a "metate", used as a base where corn is ground using a smooth, slightly oblong potato-shaped rock, called a "mano". Difficult to see, there is an etched image of a figure on this wall below the "eagle's nest", with what appears to be the start of another image to the right. These are some of a small number of images at the Square Tower site. This photo illustrates the complex engineering required to build the kiva and the walls around it - consider how arduous and time consuming it would have been to bring all these materials to the site, and then assemble them into a structure that has lasted many hundreds of years. These people were far from being "primitive", and were aware of the physics and engineering required to build and maintain these facilities. Click here for more photos of the site.