Balcony House is the Indiana Jones tour.
This is the tour with the giant ladders and a tunnel
you're gonna have to squeeze through.
But in between the ladder and the tunnel,
there is a beautiful village that has been left behind
by the Ancestral Puebloan people.
Balcony House seems to be just a smaller village
not a big community center, so it has 38 rooms and 2 kivas.
So they were a small little family unit, maybe two families
living next to each other.
Whereas, the other places we give tours are like big city centers.
First off, just to get into the site, you have to climb a 32-foot-tall ladder.
Then you start to realize how fragile it really is
and so you have to be careful not to place your hands
on the original structures themselves,
like the balcony that Balcony House gets its name for.
There's quite a few tight spaces that we get to squeeze our way through,
and that's a lot of fun because we get to go into the dwelling itself.
And also, Balcony House, it's right on the edge of the cliff,
and so a lot of people are fearful of heights,
but if you were to overcome your fear and you were to take the tour,
you will be rewarded with some of the most amazing views
from any cliff dwelling.
I think it's also fun to come to Balcony House from below it,
because your first view of it is looking up.
And so you can see this big wall along the front of it,
which is actually the retaining wall that the Pueblo people built
to create this flat foundation to build on.
When you get up there and you're standing on this level floor,
I think you have more of a sense of all the work
that went into building the place.
From there, you climb up a series of steps
that were originally carved by the Ancestral Puebloans.
And you cross into the next plaza, which we call the Kiva Plaza,
because there are two large kivas
that are submerged down into the ground.
One thing I really, really like about Balcony House
it provides better insight to what a home would have looked like
800 years ago here in Mesa Verde.
And that's something you really don't get at Long House or Cliff Palace
because they're just so large.
But when you're inside Balcony House, it's a comfortable space.
And I think a lot of visitors, they come to this park
and they first see the cliff dwellings and they think,
"That's an impossible place to live."
But as soon as you climb that ladder and you're inside the North Plaza,
it all makes sense.
And people are no longer asking, "Why did they live here?"
They look around at the beautiful walls
that still have their plasters on them,
and they think, "This is a really comfortable space."
And then to get out of Balcony House, there's this tunnel
that you crawl through and the tunnel is about 15 feet long,
and people have to get down on all fours and crawl through it.
And you get into the middle of the tunnel and you can actually stand up.
I wonder how many people when they stand up,
look above them,
because there's an original wooden roof above.
And then when we get out of the tunnel,
we climb up another couple of ladders and go up some
steps that we carved into the side of the cliff.
It always makes me wonder what it was like to raise kids
in the cliff dwellings and if kids just grew up
scaling cliff sides or if the parents in the cliff dwellings
were also nervous about their kids and didn't let them start
climbing up the cliff side until a certain age.
Again, just provides great insight to what the home
would have been like 800 years ago.