There are many, many cliff dwellings within the park, but only a handful are actually open to the public. To see most of the major sites, you have to buy a ticket for a ranger-guided tour at the visitors center. We were able to get tickets to two different sites: Cliff Palace and Balcony House. Cliff Palace was first!

Cliff Palace is really interesting and beautiful. We had a great guide who was very passionate and informative. No one knows for sure what exactly went on in the cliff dwellings or why they were abandoned, but they think that Cliff Palace was probably used primarily for ceremonial activities due to the very large number of kivas (rooms used for religious rituals) in the site.

In order to get in and out of these sites, the Ancestral Puebloans apparently just scaled the cliffs with their bare hands. We didn’t have to do that, but we did have to climb a series of ladders and the like to get in and out of Cliff Palace. It was a mere preview of things to come!

Our next tour was at Balcony House. To get in there, we had to climb this 32-foot ladder:

Eek. It wasn’t too scary, though, as long as we followed our guide’s advice to look straight ahead (never look down!) while climbing. Anyway, this site was a residence for two families. At Cliff Palace, you stand around at an overlook of the site before taking the tour; not so with Balcony House (to see the whole site, you have to go to another trail), so it’s quite a bit more difficult to photograph, but we did our best!

Getting out of Balcony House was quite a thing. The guide (accurately) called it the “Indiana Jones exit.” First we had to crawl through a narrow tunnel:

(That’s not Brian, by the way; that’s just some bloke. Sorry, British guy we secretly photographed!)

After that, we had to climb more ladders and then scale this rock thing where you have to place your feet in toeholds and hold on to metal chains on the side so you don’t fall off the cliff (!!):

The fear and the high altitude just made the whole thing more intense, but we both survived!

After we recovered from that adventure, we went to Spruce Tree House, which is one of the few sites in the park where you can take a self-guided tour:

(To reach this one, by the way, we just had to walk down a paved trail… no ladders or rock scaling required.)

At Spruce Tree House, there is a reconstructed kiva with a roof and everything that you may climb into, which was very interesting:

We had a lovely meal at the Metate Room Restaurant inside the park and then left Mesa Verde and drove back through Cortez while enjoying this beautiful sunset:

Then we headed back into Utah — normally I would have a photo of the Utah welcome sign for you here, but it was so dark by the time we reached it that I couldn’t get a decent picture, but it looked just like this one:

Now we’re at the charming Days Inn in Moab, Utah, and we’re ready to enjoy one more national park before we have to start the journey back to DC. Check back tomorrow!