Luminarias at Spruce Tree House

A Luminaria is a small lantern made with a lighted candle supported inside an open brown paper bag with a layer of sand. During the holiday season displays of Luminarias are popular in Arizona and New Mexico and other areas of the southwest.

The small lights are spaced at about ten feet along both sides of side walks and roads and create an enchanting evening display.

Mesa Verde National Park in southwest Colorado has an annual event where the route leading to the popular Spruce Tree House ruin is lined with Luminairas and the interiors and plazas of the ruin structures are lighted with camping lanterns. This is a popular event, especially with photographers. Tripods crowd the best vantage points both on the canyon rim and below.

In winter, there are normally three tours of Spruce Tree House per day, but another four are added for this special event. As dusk settles, the flickering Luminarias guide visitors down the switch back trail that descends into the ruin site. Walk carefully, it's still very dark with only candles to guide the way.

One of the problems that Ancestral Pueblo People would have had living in these cliff dweller sites is keeping warm in the winter. These rooms may have had small fires burning such that the effect may have been something like this. There are soot marks on the rock ceilings that some think indicate fires burning 24 hours a day.

My visit was right at dusk and I left just as much of the visiting crowd was still arriving. It is a twisty dark road for 25 miles to get to the Spruce Tree Ruins site, and there were ice patches in spots that don't get any winter sun. But the traffic arriving for this special event was heavy and the parking area full.

Balcony House Trail

Balcony House is one of the three cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde National Park in southwest Colorado where you have to buy a $3 dollar ticket for a ranger led one hour tour. The trail head is on the Cliff Palace Loop in the Chapin Mesa area.

The other two guided hikes are the famous Cliff Palace and the nearly equally large Long House. Balcony House is one of the most popular sites for visitors to Mesa Verde.

Everyone says that Balcony House is the Indiana Jones adventure tour. To get into the ruin you have to walk down 130 steps to get to a point below the ruin, perched high on a steep canyon wall. There was not an original entrance to the Balcony House site from this side. It was installed by the Park Service to make the visit easy. Then you have to climb a 32 foot ladder to arrive at a narrow entry, slither along a sandstone wall, then ducking through a low opening, to arrive in a small plaza. This village is thought to have been home to about 40 people 700 years ago, then mysteriously abandoned.

I had thought it had the name Balcony House because it was perched like a balcony with a low wall, hanging over a deep canyon. The low wall is called a parapet wall and is a unique feature, probably important for keeping children from falling into the canyon below.

But actually, it has this name because one of the second floor rooms has a small ledge outside the window, a feature not often preserved as well as here, but seen in other large sites.

There are two large circular ceremonial kivas on the south side of the site. This medium sized site appears to have about 28 rooms besides the two kivas. The south side may have been the business side of the site and children were kept more to the north side plaza with the protective parapet wall. The back of the site has two springs. This was a fortunate site to have water so handy.

The ruin is small compared to some of the other ones, but the adventure continues. To get out of the site you have to crawl on hands and knees through 12 feet of tunnel, then climb another ladder, and scramble up some primitive steps carved into stone, while clinging to a chain hand hold. The only place to view Balcony House besides the tour is from the Soda Canyon Trail where there is an across the canyon overlook.