File:Balcony House Tour at Mesa Verde National Park (4851540885).jpg

Balcony House is labeled as the "adventurous cliff dwelling tour." The one-hour tour involves climbing a 32-foot ladder, crawling through a 12-foot long tunnel, and climbing up a 60-foot open cliff face with stone steps and two 10-foot ladders to exit the site.

Records indicate that the Balcony House was probably first rediscovered by an excavator, S.E. Osborn, sometime in 1884 - his name and the date "March 20, 1884" being found in a dwelling nearby. Furthermore, Osborn published a newspaper account of dwellings, including one that matches the description of Balcony House, in 1886. The site was excavated by archaeologist Jesse Nusbaum in 1910.

Mesa Verde is best known for a large number of well preserved cliff dwellings, houses built in shallow caves and under rock overhangs along the canyon walls. The structures contained within these alcoves were mostly blocks of hard sandstone, held together and plastered with adobe mortar. Specific constructions had many similarities, but were generally unique in form due to the individual topography of different alcoves along the canyon walls. In marked contrast to earlier constructions and villages on top of the mesas, the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde reflected a region-wide trend towards the aggregation of growing regional populations into close, highly defensible quarters during the 1200s.

While much of the construction in these sites conforms to common Pueblo architectural forms, including Kivas, towers, and pit-houses, the space constrictions of these alcoves necessitated what seems to have been a far denser concentration of their populations.