Balcony House, Mesa Verde National Park

Balcony House is a cliff dwelling of about 40 rooms in Mesa Verde National Park in southwestern Colorado, built by Ancestral Pueblo people in the 13th century in a high alcove above Soda Canyon. It takes its name from the wooden balcony that still runs along the front of one of its rooms. Its builders controlled access to the alcove through narrow passages, and visitors today still enter by climbing a tall ladder and crawling through a tunnel. Mesa Verde's archaeological sites span more than 700 years of Ancestral Pueblo history, from about 600 to 1300 CE, and include some 600 cliff dwellings. Many Pueblo nations trace their ancestry to this region, and it remains an important place for them today. Mesa Verde was protected as a national park in 1906 and became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1978.