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.