If you're looking for a more adventurous tour,
I would definitely go with Long House.
It's actually as big as Cliff Palace.
It's 150 rooms and 21 kivas.
Long House is the most in-depth tour.
It's a hiking tour, as well, so we are going to hike 2 and a quarter miles
round trip.
You're going to descend down into a canyon about 150 feet,
so there is some elevation change, but you'll get to
actually tour through Long House, climb some ladders,
see the main water source for the Ancestral Puebloan people
which is a seep spring.
It's a litlte bit more of a challenge to get there because
you do have to walk a mile in order to get into the site.
And you walk that mile with a ranger.
You get to go beyond just the basics, you get to talk a little bit more about
what life was like even before the cliff dwellings.
Some of the highlights of the Long House tour, would number 1, be
the size of the site.
Another thing that's really great about this site is you can really see
how agriculture affected these people here.
How it allowed them to live together in such large numbers.
The views, coming in and out of Long House
just the trail getting in and out is just amazing.
You get great views down canyon,
and also you can see a lot of where the fires came through.
And we continue with the group down into the site.
We climb up the ladders and we gather around the seep spring.
The seep spring is very central to the story of the cliff dwellings.
We now believe that it's those seep springs that
bring people down from the mesa tops into the cliffs
to be closer to those water sources.
It's one of these incredible points of ingenuity
where you can see the carved little basins in the spring,
where water would collect, and even from there,
Ancestral Pueblo folks carved little channels in the bedrock
to direct the flow of water into what we call "cupules"
these little depressions, just big enough for a gourd or a clay dipper
where you can fill your water jug.
And we continue on through the site.
We go down a ladder and down a series of steps
and at the very end, we gather in a large plaza.
We see, probably by the dance plaza that's there,
that this would have been a community that did accept
some of the migration coming up from the southern areas.
In some cases, people say that this is possible to be a Great Kiva.
If it is, there's a lot of change going on at once,
and that would have come with those migrants.
It's above ground, rather than underground.
It's square, it's not round.
And it may have been open-air, rather than roofed.
And it's community-oriented.
There with my group, I love to construct an image of what life
would have looked like 800 years ago.
When the walls were twice as high.
When they were all plastered on the inside and out.
When they all had their flat roofs.
And hundreds of people from across the canyons have
come to gather to watch the celebration that was taking place
inside of that courtyard.
It would have been magical. There would have been a fire going in the middle,
it would have been reflecting off of all the walls and the people's faces
who have gathered to watch the event.
And the sound would have gone down canyon for miles.
[GROUP SHOUTING DOWN CANYON/ECHOES]
And you can imagine that sound probably makes its way
all the way down to Cliff Palace.
It provides a better sense, again, of what life was like here.
A lot of people, they simply look at this architecture and they say it's
strictly defensive, but I think there's more to the story.
Because when you're standing inside those courtyards,
and there's a large event happening,
and the sound is issuing down-canyon,
they're not hiding.
It actually seems like a very visible space.