Day 4 started early so we could head up to the top of Mesa Verde National Park for our 9:30 tour of Balcony House - an ancestral Pueblo cliff dwelling. It's about an 50 minute drive to the top of the park, but we arrived a little early.
We had a fabulous park ranger as our tour guide - he gave tons of info, obviously loved his job, was super pleasant to be around and honestly, was one of the best tour guides I've had. These cliff dwelling are literally tucked away in the wall of a canyon. Our specific dwelling was in Soda Canyon. We had to take a small but paved trail to reach our starting point - the bottom of a 30 meter ladder. We had to climb that to reach the dwelling.
Balcony house is considered a medium sized dwelling - it had 40 rooms. Each has a specific purpose from fire rooms to heat the dwelling in the winter, to smoke house rooms to preserve meet, to sleeping rooms to kivas and plazas. Balcony House also contained two rather small tunnels that we had to crawl through. A little tight... one of the times it paid to be short! We learned about their daily life, how the dwelling were likely made, their customs all the while touring a small alcove in the side of a canyon wall hundreds of feet in the air! We all survived without falling into the canyon so it was a successful tour!
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| Canyon view from dwelling |
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| You can see the others climbing the ladder to reach the dwelling. |
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| This room the only one with any kind of wall that faced the canyon. Yikes! |
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| Upper Left - soot permanently in the stone from their fires. Lower right - kiva |
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| Lower pic - visible decoration on the wall. |
After the tour, we drove to the another portion of the canyon and hiked a short trail to an overlook. This overlook would allow us to see Balcony House as it looks in the canyon wall. It looked too high in the air and tiny but honestly, felt quite spacious when we were in it!
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| Canyon wall containing Balcony House - the dwelling is in the upper right portion of the image under the semi-circle looking rock. |
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| Closer view of Balcony House from the Soda Canyon overlook. Can you find the tiny people standing in the dwelling? The beginning ladder is on the lower right. The exit path is up the left side cliff face. You can see a small ladder toward the top left. |
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| We survived the cliff dwelling tour! |
Our hike also let us see some beautiful desert landscape.
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| Soda Canyon |
After grabbing a bite of lunch, we started our journey to Moab, Utah.
We arrived in Moab, chilled in the hotel for a bit and then walked around shops of the small town. We ended the day with Mexican food and an absolutely fabulous sunset in Canyonlands!
Tomorrow - a jeep adventure!!
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