Day 2 - Mesa Verde - Long House

On Day 2 of our adventure we decided to go to the other side of the park. There is a ranger guided tour that you can go on to Long House. Long House is the Second Largest Cliff Dwelling in the Park. You have to drive down in there and then park and take a shuttle into the area. Our guides name was Marie. This one was different because you had a to climb up two ladders and started the tour in the very back of the dwelling. The rest of them that we saw, you couldn't get back into the back.

Everyone Climbing up to get to Long House

This is a view from the back of the Dwelling

This picture of the kids is right next to the spring they had in the cliff. They used the spring for their water. There is still water coming out of it today. It was really interesting to see. They even dug holes in the stone to hold water.

Behind us is a large rectangular courtyard called a dance plaza. It was similar to the Kivas, but was never enclosed by walls or had a roof. The green area back in the back was used to plant crops on. Long house looked more like a complete community.

After Long House we went to Badger House Community. There were 4 different sites you could see in this complex. More kivas, pithouses and old community ruins. I have to say I didn't take any picture of this site. By this time we had seen a lot of kivas and pithouses. It was interesting to see so many of them in one place.


They had information about each one of them that you could read. Ellie had stopped to fix her band aid and wasn't paying attention and hit her head on one of the information boards. Needless to say she got a bloody nose bleed and cut her lip. Jaden had to go running down to the rest of the people we were with to see if anyone had any tissue. I had all of that in my car, I didn't think I was going to need it. That was the only mishap we had, thank goodness!
After Badger house we went to a few other place and went back to the car.

This is step House. It is a self guided tour right by the parking lot. It was a long winding paved path. This one was a distance to climb down into. We Walked down the other direction and took this picture. We then drove back to the other side of the park and went to Far View. This was a community that you could actually go in. Far View to come....