The Mesa Verde Institute (MVI) is an outdoor field education program of the nonprofit Mesa Verde Museum Association. MVI offers special reasonably-priced activities to Mesa Verde National Park visitors that are designed to help visitors better understand and experience the park's incomparable cultural and natural resources. MVI is also a partner in the free Four Corners Lecture Series, which annually offers talks on a variety of topics at venues throughout Montezuma County and at Fort Lewis College.

All MVI programs are led by uniformed National Park Service rangers or, in the case of our photography workshop, by a university professor.

MVI offers a variety of programs, from a one-hour twilight tour of Cliff Palace (Mesa Verde's largest cliff dwelling) with historical figures from the park's past, to part or full-day ranger-guided hikes off-pavement to Ancestral Puebloan sites not normally accessible by the public, to a multi-day fall photography workshop. Hike locations may change each year, and activities are available beginning at the end of May and extending into mid-October.