Originally published in Rocky Mountain Caving Volume 43, Issue 1

There are exceedingly few reasons to shoot film in 2025. As far as I can figure there are but two: excessive pretension or downright good taste. As is always the case, there’s a fine line between those two motivations. I would like to believe I’m on the latter side, although I can’t count on both my hands those who believe I fall on the former. Strangely, the archaic medium has seen a resurgence in the last decade. Those old cameras from your parents or your grandparents are coming out of the closet, hitting the streets, and in just a handful of cases, going underground.

I shoot film because it looks different. Because having a negative is tangible proof that a moment occurred in a physical location. The world is getting confusing and fake. Film is simply a rebellion against that. So too are the oft bemoaned limitations of the medium, a strength when considered from the perspective of an avid film photographer. The limited shots in a roll - a maximum of 36 - make you really consider the shot before you press the shutter release. The exorbitant expense of purchasing and developing film forces the photographer to value and consider every photo they have in their collection. Limited film stocks makes you spend more time considering lighting. So too is the physical printing of a photograph something inherent to the medium.

Micah and I are, presumably, some of the last speleo-photographers who choose to shoot on film. We don’t want to be the last. This article hopes to provide a framework to the prospective film photographer who wants to take their work back underground. Micah and I have two different approaches - both have met with failures and successes. We take different attitudes towards selection of film stocks, gear, and lighting but the results of both approaches are beautiful.

Gear

In terms of gear, Micah and I diverge considerably. Micah has a cheaper set up: his highschool film camera transported inside a waterproof bag itself inside a soft camera case. He notes that despite this double layer of protection, he would not submerge this camera if it wasn’t inside his Swaygo as well. Cave photographers have warned me off a set up like this due to the classic “cave destroys everything” problem we’re all used to dealing with. He hasn’t encountered any issues, however. It might be due to the fact that most Colorado caves are pretty dry but dust is supposed to wreak havoc on cameras as well. At any rate, Micah’s camera is fine with his setup. His camera uses a 55 -180mm zoom lens that he doesn’t ever change out.

I use a specially curated photography setup. I shoot on a Nikonos V, quite possibly the toughest camera ever made, that I transport through in a Pelican 1200 case. Being a scuba diving camera from 1983, it’s waterproof and robust but it lacks a lot of the automatic light metering functions that Micah’s camera has. You can choose to shoot it on shutter speed priority but that’s it. You always set aperture yourself and set to the speed of the film that you loaded. It’s a lot trickier a setup but you get a hand of it pretty quick. The Nikonos V has a variety of lenses available for purchase but I only have a 28mm lens. I’m hoping to buy more in the near future. I also carry around a light tripod that I got at a thriftstore for something like 5 bucks.

Film

Micah and I diverge on selecting film stocks as well. He primarily shoots on expired film that he purchases from ebay or facebook marketplace on the cheap. Expired film is always a bit of a turkey shoot as you never know in what conditions it was stored but he’s rarely had a roll thats a complete dud. Expired film means more grain, a lot more grain. But unlike our photographic forebearers, our generation seems to love the look of grain. Micah’s position is that some film being sold today is so high quality that its indistinguishable from a digital photo. Expired film, with all its unpredictable idiosyncrasies, is unmistakably film and it stands out because of that. The chief advantages of his style is that its cheap, easily stands out when compared to most pictures today, and allows him to blast through more rolls than myself.

I’ve honestly come around to Micah’s style of things. After I shoot through my remaining couple of rolls I’ll start purchasing expired film like he does, but it’s worth going over what I’ve been doing over the last couple of years. I shoot mainly on Kodak ColorPlus 400 but when I do I set my camera to 800 speed film. These reduces the shutter speed, a necessity when shooting portraiture in caves, and allows for more darkness in the image. I think this lets the subject stand out and benefit from more contrast. I will, on special occasions, shoot on Portra 800 which is the Ferrari of currently produced film stocks. Being a Ferrari, it’s quite expensive. One of the major failings of my style is that I don’t crank through nearly as much film as Micah does. Since I spend more money per frame, I end up shooting maybe 6 or 7 shots per cave trip. Micah probably shoots double that. For one special occasion I shot on Portra 800 and had it specially push processed at 1600. As the way these things go, I didn’t get a single good photo on that trip. My name is certainly Ozymandias…

Style

Micah seems to value “setup” portraiture a bit more than myself. He’ll regularly pull out his camera, order around the various cavers on the trip, and deploy some breathtaking lighting. He has done unspeakably well with this method. The photo of myself below my editor’s notes on the inside cover of this page is owing to his efforts. I enjoy capturing the alien landscape of caves a little bit more. You could say that I tend towards still lifes. I like minimal lighting and a lot of darkness to allow the subject to stand out.

But I’ve learned a lot from Micah’s method and I’m introducing more “canned” backlighting to my images. Other Advice I’ve been thinking about the best setup for an up and coming cave film photographer in writing this article. If you have no background in photography, I honestly think film is the best place to start. Getting started is far more simple than digital photography with all its option screens and bells and whistles. The best set up to start, I think, is with a little waterproof point and shoot like the Pentax Zoom90-WR. It’s light, extremely tough, has a built in adjustable lens, and automatically sets everything for you. It doesn’t have all the options of the full SLRs me and Micah use but point and shoots have an undeniable style of their own. I’d advise shooting on expired film to lean into the point and shoot style (and save money). Most point and shoots do have timers built in as well as tripod ports to get group photos.

Update

Micah and I’s cave photography practice has evolved considerably since this article was originally published a year ago in Rocky Mountain Caving Volume 43, Issue 1. Micah has started to shoot on mostly unexpired film, adopting my “daily driver” Kodak ColorPlus 400. Conversely, Braxton has started to development his own black and white film and has been primarily blasting through Ilford 400 and Kentmere. He’s also adopted the meticulous lighting practices championed by Micah.

“We have something here that is significant to the first chapter of our history. I’ll go to hell if I let it go undocumented before I die.”

Those were the words of west-side historian David Hughes when interviewed about the grand cavern that’s hidden within one of the Front Range’s most iconic landmarks – North Gateway Rock in Garden of the Gods.

For any of you less familiar with Colorado Springs’ iconic geology, let me rephrase. Kissing Camels is hollow.

That’s right. The internationally renowned, 320 foot tall, red sandstone ridge nestled at the base of Pikes Peak is hiding a secret, and it’s hiding it well. If you asked any of the millions of people that visit the park every year about the cave, you’d likely get the same answer from nearly every one of them, locals and tourists alike. “What cave? There’s no cave in Kissing Camels.”

Oh, to Start Over Again...

In 1935, an employee of the now-demolished Garden of the Gods Hidden Inn uttered those same words when an old west-sider came into the inn asking about the cave. When the Inn’s staff tried to tell him that there was no cavern beneath Kissing Camels, he claimed that he’d been in it many times in his life and explained that he’d like to show it to his great-grandchildren while they were in town visiting. Unfortunately, the employee’s denials turned him away and he was never given a chance to provide more details about himself, the cave, or his experiences exploring it. Whether he tracked the cave down on his own and shared its historic sandstone walls with his family is left to speculation.

However, that morning’s interaction seems to have firmly lodged itself in the employee’s mind. Later that day, they called the local Civilian Conservation Corps and recounted the old man’s story about the cave inside the towering rocks to the east of the Inn.

Without delay, the CCC set to investigating the newfound legend of a large cave in Garden of the Gods. Before long, they discovered a small aperture along the west side of North Gateway Rock just to the south of the Inn. At the time of discovery the CCC reported that the shadowy opening in the red sandstone was too small for even a dog to crawl through, so they began excavating the entrance to make it properly traversable.

Some time later, they’d dug away enough sand and dirt that men and their tools could pass through the opening into a small passage beyond. Through that crawl, the members of the corps made a significant rediscovery. Sprawling out from the passageway they found a colossal fissure spanning 100 feet in either direction and climbing as high as 100 feet into the interior of North Gateway Rock, meaning that nearly a third of the landmark’s height was in fact hollow.

As the team of workers-turned-explorers made their way into the fissure, their voices carried up into the heights of the sandstone and echoed back down. A later explorer in the 1960s described the phenomenon beautifully – “The echoes seem to linger on and on as though the inside of the cave was starved to hear a human voice, and, once heard, hesitant to leave it die.”

But neither the strange and unique geology of the place nor its acoustic qualities was the most amazing thing recorded that day in 1935. It was instead something of historical and archaeological significance that would go on to define the cave.

Stretching up all the way from the red sandy floor, the CCC crew found countless etchings – names and dates of past visitors reaching all the way back to the mid-1800s when many of Colorado’s first pioneers braved the Wild West during the Pikes Peak or Bust gold rush, long before Colorado was a state, and even before Colorado City, Manitou, or Colorado Springs had been founded.

Among these etchings are the names of members of the Lawrence party, a gold rush party from Lawrence, Kansas which included one member who was instrumental in the founding of Colorado City as well as the “Bloomer Girl”, Julia Holmes, who was a 19th century feminist and the first European woman to summit Pikes Peak. Also among the autographs are the names of famous photographer William Henry Jackson, Colorado pioneer Lou Frost, and, likely oldest among them, Jacob Spaulding, after whom the sandstone cave has been named.

In fact, it was this trove of historical autographs that suggested to the CCC workers that there was still more to be discovered in the strange cavern that they had uncovered. As they absorbed the startling scene around them, they realized that many of the carvings dipped below the sand. This implied that the fissure extended deeper below their feet. Invigorated by the potential of fresh discovery, they rushed to arrange their tools and started digging in what must have been an echoing cacophony of shovels scooping the red sand and ringing off of the hard rock walls. And did they ever dig! Before the project reached its end the CCC had removed a shocking 75 truckloads of red, sandy earth from the floor of the cave, significantly increasing its depth.

As they dug, they continued to uncover etching after etching, and once the day was done, they reported that the names and dates stretched so far up the walls that many of them couldn’t be reached without the use of a tall ladder. Not only was the cavern hidden within North Gateway Rock a geological anomaly, it was a historical and archaeological gold mine.

Unfortunately, before the history could be more thoroughly recorded or the cavern more fully excavated, a boulder dislodged from the ceiling, narrowly missing one of the CCC workers. This event would spell the untimely end for 1935’s efforts in Spaulding’s Cavern. The city deemed the cave unsafe and, with no sense for research or study, promptly sealed the entrance with no plans of reopening it.

Middle School Hijinks

Spaulding’s Cavern, however, was destined to be reopened whether the city had planned for it or not. In 1963 the cave’s small entrance was once again unblocked. Now, exactly how that may have happened depends on which issue of Colorado Springs’ primary newspaper, the Gazette, you read. Late in 2008, the Gazette published an article recounting much of the cave’s story and implied that erosion had taken its toll on the cement plug that had once sealed Spaulding’s Cavern from the outside world, leading to its re-opening in 1963.

In early 2009 they published a second article that began with a correction. According to the 2009 article it wasn’t a force of nature that opened the portal into Gateway Rock, but it was something equally unstoppable - middle-school hijinks and trespassing. By 2009, I suppose, the statute of limitations on vandalism and trespassing had passed, so long-time westsider Mike Trapp decided to reach out to the Gazette and set the record straight.

In 1963 Trapp and his friends were middle schoolers and had developed a love for caves and the exploration and sense of adventure they promise. They had been spending their days exploring the caves near Cave of the Winds, presumably those in Williams Canyon, when an old west-sider told them about a forgotten cave in Garden of the Gods. The old mountainman even suggested that the farthest reaches of the cave’s passages may stretch all the way back to Cave of the Winds! The Gazette article dismisses this possibility. However, they’ve never technically reached the bottom of Spaulding’s Cavern, so I’m holding out hope (ever-dilusional-cave-digger that I am).

Fueled by the myth of some unknown and forgotten cave just waiting for them to find and explore, Trapp and his friends began taking evening trips into the Garden after school. Soon they’d found the hidden entrance to the cavern and, after a few days of effort, busted through the wall of North Gateway Rock and into the slim passage that leads to the echoing reaches of the cavern.

It was shortly after Trapp’s adventures that the park’s caretaker discovered the newly opened passage in the sandstone. The news quickly made its way up the chain of command and by the end of the day a new effort to analyze the cavern had taken place. Three Colorado Springs employees had made their way into the cavern, a few pictures were taken, and the city had once again sealed its entrance with little more than a short article in the Gazette acknowledging its historical significance.

I’ll Go To Hell...

Decades passed once more before the cave returned to the public consciousness. The modern tale of Spaulding’s Cavern found its next chapter in 2008, when David Hughes kicked off his efforts to have the cave opened, studied, and properly protected. Hughes’ work regarding the cave first made its way into the Colorado Springs Gazette in the same December 2008 article that had erroneously attributed the 1963 reopening to erosion.

Having uncovered much of the history shared here and more, Hughes asserted that it was of utmost importance that Spaulding’s Cavern should be carefully opened, properly studied, thoroughly recorded, and securely gated.

He knew it might be a long road, but David Hughes was no slouch. Since completing his military career, Hughes had already taken on a list of challenges and projects that had earned him a reputation. From expeditions into the remote Himalayas intended to bring the internet to isolated villages, to clashing with the city of Colorado Springs over both the past and the future of a historical sandstone cavern - David Hughes was willing to work against the odds once he’d determined the value of a venture.

After gathering community support for his intended projects in the cavern, Hughes brought his proposition to the city. Unfortunately, he met with some resistance. Among those who had their qualms with the project were Matt Mayberry, the director of the Colorado Springs Pioneers’ Museum, and Paul Butcher, the director of the City Parks Department. They voiced concerns about budget and manpower and pushed back against Hughes’ proposal. Plus, they said, since it seems the historical aspects of the cavern are well-preserved there didn’t seem to be a pressing need to move forward with an immediate survey.

Of course, Hughes was not deterred. In his eyes, funding and manpower were simply puzzles to be solved, so it wasn’t long before he started pursuing a grant from Colorado’s State Historical Fund and rallying the support of archaeologists, historians, and geologists from across the state.

In a matter of months, Hughes had managed to secure a grant for nearly $10,000 and had received resounding support from enough experts that the project would have more than enough manpower. Many of them were even willing to work for free, which further simplified funding the proposal.

So, with the solutions to the city’s concerns in his pocket, Hughes made a triumphant return to resubmit his proposal. After waiting for deliberation on the new developments, Hughes nearly got the answer he had been looking for. The city gave the Spaulding’s Cavern project conditional approval. The funds were sorted and the experts were rearing to begin their survey, but Hughes had not provided any confirmation that the Southern Ute tribe did not oppose the project.

Of course, Hughes did not approach the city without the tribe’s approval for lack of trying. He was well aware that a project like this in the Garden would need native approval, since many tribes consider the area spiritually significant. In the ‘90s, the Southern Ute tribe had been selected as the representative tribe to speak for Native American interests in Garden of the Gods. Hughes had reached out on multiple occasions and had written not one, but two letters to the representatives of the Southern Ute tribe.

Hughes had found no success in his attempts to contact the tribe about Spaulding’s Cavern and shared as much in his proposal to the city. As a part of the city’s conditional approval they agreed that a request would be sent to the tribe on official City of Colorado Springs letterhead and determined that should the tribe forgo a response it would constitute a lack of opposition to the project. In that case, Hughes would be allowed to move forward with his survey of the cavern.

Shortly after Hughes’ proposal the letter from the city was in the mail and the wait began. As the days stretched on and the city’s deadline approached, Hughes began to make the final preparations to get the survey underway. However, despite his best efforts and the support he had garnered, Hughes’ plans would not come to fruition.

With the project’s pending approval right around the corner, Matt Mayberry was able to connect with Alden Naranjo, a member of the Southern Ute tribe who was able to offer an official response regarding Hughes’ proposal. It’s unclear how much context Mr. Mayberry was able to convey to Mr. Naranjo or if Mr. Naranjo had been aware of the letters from Hughes or from the city, but the culmination of their conversation was that of a voiced opposition to an archaeological dig in the Garden.

Mayberry conveyed as much to Paul Butcher and Butcher brought the denial back to the city. That spelled the end for Hughes’ proposal. The grant money, the experts willing and excited to donate their time and knowledge, the research, and the community support - all of that momentum was lost with this final input from the tribe.

Despite their attempts, the Gazette was unsuccessful in reaching Alden Naranjo for comment about the tribe’s opposition to the project. No further details about the tribe’s knowledge of the intended scope of the survey or why they had not responded to the letters from Hughes or the city could be gathered. In the end, the fact remains that Spaulding’s Cavern has not been opened, studied, or recorded as a part of this effort.

Disappointed but never truly defeated, Hughes was determined to get the last word. When interviewed by the Gazette, he shared his intention to write a pamphlet about the cave for the Old Colorado City Historical Society. He promised that it would include a final chapter dedicated to detailing “the city’s thwarting our efforts to do this archaeological study.”

Unfortunately, it appears that Hughes never found the time to write that pamphlet as his life continued to fill with new projects. During my research I visited the Old Colorado City Historical Society and received invaluable support from a couple of individuals who had met Hughes during his flurry of effort. That being said, Hughes did write one more public statement about the cave. It was several years later and a new archaeological dig was proposed in the Garden. This time it was a project to record and recover artifacts from the Palmer family’s time in and around Garden of the Gods. Hughes, when he heard this news, wasted no time in highlighting what he saw as significant hypocrisy on the part of the city.

In a letter to the editor of the Gazette, he made his point clear:

A few decades ago, the Colorado Springs Park board - backed by the director of the city-owned Pioneers Museum - denied the application by researchers of the Old Colorado City Historical Society to enter the ‘cave’ in the west side Kissing Camels red rock, and document in modern ways the many known signatures, drawings, markings all done by the first explorers to the region in the 1800s. We had professional ecological advice, and offered a way and funds to reseal the cave entrance, and record the contents without disturbing them.

But among the objectors to our plan were a number of Ute Indians - or their spokesmen - who claimed that the red rock area was ‘sacred’ to many tribes. So we got a firm no, even though we know that the cave has been trespassed numerous times before and since.

Now we read in your paper - and via television, that an “archaeological” project is underway to dig up Gen. William Palmer’s trash buried in the soil on the Garden’s ground.

So much for the sacred Garden of the Gods or legitimate research of the markings made by our forebearers. I guess Gen. Palmer’s trash is more important.

- David Hughes

These were Hughes’ last public writings about Spaulding’s Cavern and they mark a close to his chapter in the cave’s story. But, like the stories of many other interesting and elusive aspects of our world, there was more to be told.

One More Time

A few years later in 2015, Colorado Springs author and photographer Stewart Green was enjoying a slow morning among the shadows of the sandstone ridges of Garden of the Gods. As he wandered the park and made his way around North Gateway Rock he came across a cadre of tourists who had gotten themselves stuck a short distance up the foot of the rocks. Green aided their descent and warned them that they would have had bigger issues had the rangers found them climbing without a permit. The tourists thanked him for his help, engaged in some pleasant conversation about the park, and then asked him a curious question - what did he know about the cave around the ridge?

For not the first time in the park’s history were the words “what cave? There isn’t a cave in North Gateway Rock” uttered forth from the mouth of someone otherwise very familiar with Garden of the Gods. “Yes there is!” said the tourists, “It’s right around the corner. We saw it but we were too afraid to go in.”

Perplexed, Green sent them on their way and struck his own path along the familiar red sandstone in the direction the tourists had pointed. A short scramble through the scrub oak and juniper along the base of the ridge and he found himself standing in front of an eroded alcove hidden by the brush and smaller ridges around him. Remnants of cement and stone sat scattered in the sand. The tourists were right. The alcove held a dark passage that worked its way into North Gateway Rock almost directly below the iconic Kissing Camels.

The cement closure was once again broken open, likely by a new group of adventurous teenagers keen on uncovering the secret cave’s mysteries. Green’s imagination and sense of adventure were bolstered. Noting the opportunity, he trekked back to his vehicle, made his way home, and immediately began preparing to explore and document the cavern himself. He knew that this would likely be his only chance to enter the cavern and that it would likely be one of the only times that the cave could truly be well-documented, so he packed his camera gear and set it aside for the next morning.

Early the next day Green drove to the Garden, hiked around North Gateway Rock admiring it in the light of a new discovery, and made his way up to the base of the ridge where he had found the cave’s entrance the day before, just to the southeast of where the historic Hidden Inn had stood until the late 90’s. Cool air wafted from the dark opening as he turned on his headlamp and situated his camera gear.

A deep breath filled with the anticipation of discovery and Green was on his stomach crawling through the cramped passage. Soon it began to open up. Crawling turned to scrambling as Green made his way up and over large sandstone boulders that formed a steep slope in front of him. Then, at the precipice of the rockpile, Green found himself standing in the echoing midst of the grand cavern that Hughes had fought so hard to have studied.

The fact that Green and Hughes had never met is evidenced by Green’s ignorance of the existence of Spaulding’s Cavern, but even without Hughes’ influence Green came to the same conclusion about the sandstone fissure - this place needed to be documented. So Green got to work. He meticulously photographed the cavern and the names, dates, and etchings carved into its sandstone walls.

However, as he recorded what he could in the cave, Green observed that one of Hughes’ fears had come true. Back in 2008, Mayberry and Butcher had claimed that there was no need to rush a survey of the cave because all of the history was safely preserved within the sandstone, but they hadn’t accounted for the very forces of nature that had formed the cavern to begin with.

The sandstone nature of Spaulding’s Cavern means that it was carved from the heart of North Gateway Rock by countless years of persistent erosion as moisture within the cave broke down the conglomerate and carried it to the sandy floor. Historical accounts even mention a small stream of water falling down the North face of the cavern and flowing across its sandy floor before disappearing into the mud near the center of the large room.

Unfortunately, sealing the cave’s entrance with an airtight plug of cement and steel prevented moisture from escaping and significantly accelerated the erosion within the cavern. According to Green, many of the names had become nearly illegible. Carvings that had survived within the walls of North Gateway Rock from the 1800s until 1963 relatively unscathed had greatly deteriorated in half as much time as the humidity slowly built up within the cavern.

It’s impossible to say how much damage could have been prevented if the cave had been opened years earlier when Hughes petitioned the city, but it emphasizes that Hughes had been right in his determination to document and protect the cavern before it was too late. Regardless of how much additional deterioration had occurred, it seems clear that the history was not in fact safely preserved within the sandstone walls of North Gateway Rock.

Having observed this, Green luckily had the foresight to protect Spaulding’s Cavern for whatever its next chapter may be. Once he had collected his photographs and was satisfied with his time in the cave, he made a careful exit through the cramped passage. Back in the morning light and standing beneath the landmark he’d once thought himself completely familiar with, Green took out his phone and called a park ranger. He explained that someone had broken through the entrance of the cave and recounted the damage that he had found inside, suggesting that the cave should be closed off once again but that it needed to be done in a way that allowed air to flow through the cavern to carry off the humidity before it could build up and cause further damage. The ranger did heed Green’s warnings and Spaulding’s Cavern is now closed off by steel bars and sandstone boulders. The closure at first appears airtight, but the steady flow of a cool breeze can be felt just outside the cave’s entrance.

Epilogue

This brings us to the present day. David Hughes passed away in 2021. It’s unclear whether he was aware of the 2015 chapter of the cavern’s story, but it seems likely he would have taken solace in the knowledge that Spaulding’s Cavern did not in fact go undocumented before his storied years had come to an end.

According to Green, his photos of the cave are maintained in a collection alongside the rest of his photography at the Pikes Peak Public Library. To an extent, Spaulding’s Cavern has now been well documented. However, the cave has yet to undergo a true archaeological or geological survey and it remains unrecognized within the park or its visitor center. Not to mention many questions are still left unanswered. Where does the water exit the cavern? Is there another entrance? Does the formation of this fissure suggest that the park’s other sandstone ridges may also be hollow? Does this affect the safety of climbers or present a unique ecosystem for wildlife? What can we learn about our history? Are there artifacts left buried in the sand?

We do have something that is significant here and it does deserve to be properly acknowledged. It is my hope that in the coming years the city will add one more chapter to the story of Spaulding’s Cavern by properly acknowledging the cave and its history, both recent and distant, among the park’s signage and hopefully even by revisiting the city’s conversation with the Southern Ute tribe in order to open the door to a proper survey that is able to fully study both the historical and geological aspects of the cave.

My Sweet, Dearest, Beautiful Spelunkers,

Hey guys! I’m excited to bring you another edition of Rocky Mountain Caving. I’m especially proud of this one and I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I’ve enjoyed putting it together.

I want to make my two usual pleas. Firstly, that our readers, especially our digital ones, consider donating to Rocky Mountain Caving. Collecting and setting up a system for Grotto Digital Subscriptions have proven a pain and I’d like to try running digital subscriptions on the honor system. Physical subscriptions each lose RMC a small amount of money which the digital subscriptions, when functioning properly, should be able to make up. I’d just ask our engaged digital subscribers to consider donating somewhere in the range of $2 - $10 per year. This should be enough to make RMC break even. If times are tough don’t worry about it and consider donating next issue!

BIG DONATION LINK BIG DONATION LINK BIG DONATION LINK

Secondly, I’d like to ask that you consider writing into Rocky Mountain Caving. I know there are dozens of fascinating projects going on around the state and I’d love to have their results and ensuing shenanigans published in these pages. I’m a SoCoMoGroBro to the core but I’d love to see more submissions from grottoes I’m not as well acquainted with. This is, in the end, our magazine. To be a Colorado Caver and be published with the names Davis, Rhinehart, Frazier, and the like is a legacy we should all be immensely proud of. At any rate, its the honor of my life to be counted amongst you.

Yours Cavingly,

Braxton Fuller, June 3, 2026

Micah Bean is known around Colorado as the Deathcore Cowboy, the most eligible speleo bachelor in the state, and my very own good time boy. Would it surprise the reader to learn that behind his dashing green eyes and ruffled blond hair there is hidden an ominous secret? The evils of Sawney Bean and his band of brigands stamp themselves on Micah’s visage, his complexion itself being proof of the debauchery of the past. It’s no little known fact that blonde hair and green eyes are the result of incest in one’s ancestry. Micah’s affinity with the Wendigo, a man forced into monstrosity by consumption of human flesh, cursed to forever hunger for that forbidden fruit, can only come from his ancestors, cast to the flames for refusing to give up that forbidden fruit. Let us unfold this tale as a warning to any who would dare to court him, to get lost behind those handsome eyes, to stumble into the perverse evil of his loins.

Sawney of the Bean Clan is said to have inhabited a sea cave on the popular road between Girvan and Ballantrae sometime in the 1500s. The Bean clan pulled travellers from the road with a large hook, dragging them into the shadows, hitting them over the head, and butchering them still alive within their cave. The 200-meter long cave was so positioned that during high tide it’s entrance was hidden from passersby and investigators alike. It’s said that over 1,000 victims disappeared in this manner and that Sawney continued undetected in his savagery for two and a half decades.

By that time Sawney had fathered dozens of children with his wife, women kidnapped from the road, and his own children. He fed them all on human flesh and did his best to confine his family, other than his sons, to their cave. At some point, it became impossible to hide his crimes and growing troglodite clan of bandits. King James II ordered a local militia to investigate the disappearances and Sawney Bean was tracked back to his cave, his clan being captured and sentenced to death by fire. That is, other than one young girl, aged perhaps 1 or 2.

This young girl was taken to the nearby Prestwick to be fostered with local parents under the assumption that she was innocent of the crimes of her family. After just a couple of years her foster parents were found dead in their bed chamber, chunks of flesh flayed from their body. The only survivor in the house was this child of Sawney. In the subsequent trial, she was sentenced to burn at only twelve years old. An English jurist named Richard Burton recorded her trial and final words in a law textbook from 1715:

about which time a certain thief who lived privately in a den, with his wife and children, were all burned alive, they having made it their practice for many years to kill young people and eat them; one girl only of a year old was saved, and brought up at Dundee, who at twelve years of age being found guilty of the same horrid crime, was condemned to the same punishment, and when the people followed her in great multitudes to execution, wondering at her unnatural villainy, she turned toward them, and with a cruel countenance said, “What do you thus rail at me, as if I had done such a heinous act, contrary to the nature of man? I tell you that if you did but know how pleasant the taste of man’s flesh was, none of you all would forbear to eat it;” and thus with an impenitent and stubborn mind she suffered deserved death.

Let this be a warning to those who dare to associate with Micah Bean. In Micah is a monster hidden or slumbering, let that be realized. The progeny of Sawney cannot escape the stain of his evil, still less expunge it from their soul. Micah’s affinity with caves and the escape of the Wendigo, birthed from his ancestral memory, is proof enough alone. Soon or late one of us shall suffer to be eaten. Twelve eggs and a gallon of milk a day cannot satiate him for long. One of us is soon to die. Why cannot man learn from the past, and suffer to repeat it in the future?

Today a cave between Ballantrae and Girvan is on Google Maps labeled as having been the hovel in which Sawney Bean lived. Just as the story tells, it’s right on the beach, it’s entrance covered at high tide. So too is there publicly labeled on Google Maps, Not Sawney Bean’s Cave just nearby. I would challenge Micah to sleep a night in his ancestors’ hovel. It seems the only way to break the curse!

Serious Time

So, was this Sawney Bean character real? Probably not. That a band of cannibalistic brigands could live so close to two towns and a major thoroughfare undetected for 25 years strains credulity. That this band could consume over 1,000 people in that time whilst imprisoning dozens of women and children in a 200-meter long cave shatters what little reason is left.

The Sawney Bean tale seems to have grown in the telling. For one, even the boundaries of Sawney Bean’s life vary wildly between tellings. Wikipedia simply says he lived in, “the 1500s or 1600s.“ That’s a pretty accurate represenation of the variance in the primary sources. Many of which do not mention Sawney by name but rather refer vaguely to Scottish brigands in the hills. In truth, what started as racist English stories about the Scottish hillmen, similar to Northern stereotypes of Appalachian hill people, got condensed into a single story: Sawney Bean. He became he embodiment of interracial strife necessarily stoked by the English in the aftermath of the Jacobite Rebellion. The word “Sawney“ itself, tellingly, is an antiquated nickname for Scotsmen in general. If Sawney Bean the man ever did live, he would probably bear little resemblance to his historical reputation and his name is unlikely to have been Sawney.

The Scottish Clans in the aftermath of the official British conquest also fought a considerable public relations struggle to stand out as “the biggest kid on the block.“ The Scottish hills remained unpacified for a century after the British conquest. Politics in the Scottish interior began to more closely resemble Los Angeles in the 90s rather than British imperial domination. Every interior clan has ridiculous stories about their brutality and self reliance. Those of the Bean Clan just happen to have been incredibly catchy from the perspective of outsiders and the insiders alike.

On balance, I would wager that Sawney Bean did exist and verly likely had a relationship with the cave that bears his name. A cave with an entrance hidden by the tides would be a valuable asset to local guerillas fighting an occupying army.He may well have even eaten human flesh on the occassion - ritual cannibalism of one’s defeated enemies being a common tactic in tribal warfare. But no clan clan can long persist whilst defiling children, kidnapping women wantonly, and constantly subverting the public morality. The Sawney of history makes a better story than he would have made an effective chief.

But thats boring! Let’s burn Micah at the stake.

Queens Canyon Cave was amongst the first wild caves I visited in Colorado. I have fond memories of the fugly little system and have spent more than a few days practicing survey skills, ridgewalking, and generally having a good time in its immediate vicinity. However, as I grew more experienced and gained more knowledge of the local karst environment, I came to see Queens Canyon as having very little potential for much more cave than what is already present.

That all came to an end when Southern Colorado Mountain Grotto caver, Alex Bufmack, approached me at a grotto meeting.

“Hey man, I found a hole in the woods,” he said coyly.

“Well that’s a good start,” I shot back, always excited to see a picture of some hole in the woods.

He pulled out his phone and showed me a picture of what he had found - a sinkhole in what was obviously limestone. He showed me the location, and to my surprise, it was located up canyon from Queens Canyon Cave proper - I didn’t even know there was any limestone up there.

A couple of weeks later Alex, visiting Illinois caver Matthew Burns, and I were bushwacking to the GPS point located somewhere off Rampart Range Road, well within forest service property. The sink that we visited, Alex christened Punchdrunk Cave for the failed attempt to discover the Punchbowls on which he initially found the hole. Although the hole was certainly in limestone, it must be the smallest pocket of limestone I’ve ever seen. The pit extends perhaps 6 feet vertically into the hillside and is immediately surrounded by granite. How a limestone formation like this could possibly emerge is beyond me.

The usual schizophrenic levels of delusion ensued, each of us insisting that this tiny speck of limestone on a granite hill was really proof that the interior of the hill was filled with karst and our digging thus justified. We called this, for we were quite hungry at that point, “The Eclair Theory.”

After a short dig Matthew, Alex, and I turned our eyes across a gulley that separated us from Rampart Range and spied some interesting looking bluffs. Although we couldn’t say for sure whether the cliff faces we were looking at were limestone, we strongly suspected that they were. After a short dig that first day, we packed up our tools and headed back for our cars.

I’ve since visited Punch Drunk and have decided that it couldn’t possibly extend any farther than what is already visible. The tiny hole, however, does have an exquisite sea urchin fossil on display.

The next weekend Southern Colorado Mountain Grotto caver Rowan Wolfe and I returned to the limestone bluffs that Alex, Matthew, and I had spied the weekend prior. They proved to definitely be limestone and actually contained some extremely promising leads. Rowan and I split up upon reaching the limestone cliffs; one of us taking the top, the other the bottom. It wasn’t 10 minutes before Rowan called out, “Cave!”

I came scrambling their way as quick as I could. Upon seeing the cave I immediately found my pants filling with hot, gooey liquid.

I said to Rowan, “I definitely just shit myself.”

As a notorious prankster, jokester, and jester, it took them a while to believe me. When I continued to forcefully implore them to turn around as I was about to take my pants off and scrape the wet peanut butter consistency liquid from my butt with some sharp rocks, they finally began to take in the gravity of the situation. Perhaps illustrative of why Rowan and I are such good friends, they waited until I had used multiple sharp rocks as butt crack scrapers before they let me know that they had packed toilet paper.

At any rate, the cave I had just pooped myself in front of was likewise filled with turd. Large piles of rat excrement was frozen in heaping piles that resembled melting chocolate ice cream. To that end, Rowan proposed the name of local Colorado Springs ice cream establishment, The Tasty Freeze, to also grace the newly discovered cave.

A little ways on from The Tasty Freeze is another sinkhole I was lucky enough to spot first. It extended some 5 vertical feet into the crown of the cliff face. I proposed the entirely too long Land of Hope and Glory to be the name of this cave. I of course retract that suggestion.

At this point, Rowan and I had had a hell of a day. Rowan had suffered a bad fall earlier in the day, scraping the heck out of their thigh, and the hike to our position had been grueling. We packed up our things and set our minds to returning in the next couple of weeks.

Rowan and I announced the first official Southern Colorado Mountain Grotto trip to dig Land of Hope and Glory and the Tasty Freeze at the following grotto meeting. My usual bribes of free food and coffee at the dig site were liberally applied. A large group of 15 cavers signed on to the dig.

Not only were we able to run digs at both leads simultaneously, the Tasty Freeze and Land, but we also assigned a third team to dig at another promising-looking spot.

Rowan, despite their extreme phobia of vomiting, volunteered to lead the dig at the Tasty Freeze saying, “I wanted to see my cave dig through.” The Tasty Freeze team was well equipped to handle the particularly disgusting environment, however. They had masks, gloves, hand sanitizer, and a go get ‘em attitude. Vivian Chattergee, Rowan Wolfe, and Emma Koller made significant progress on the Tasty Freeze lead. Later in the day the Tasty Freeze team reported making a voice connection to another hole on the cliff face.

At Land of Hope and Glory, a team of our strongest boys were tasked with removing large rock debris. Our big strong boys performed bravely in their endeavour, breaking into a fissure passage below that connected the top of the cliff to the bottom. The boys pursued a strategy of literally kicking the floor out from under them and increased the depth of Land of Hope and Glory from about 5 feet to about 20! The unintended consequence of this astounding progress was that a system of wind was established that whipped a large quantity of dust into the upper dig chamber. The photo at the top of this article shows Jacob Murphy in the throes of that blasted dust devil. Although I can’t now remember everyone’s names who worked on that dig, I must extend my particular congratulations to Morgan and Jacob for their stalwart efforts.

Thirdly, a belly crawl dig was established following a shallow layer of air extending straight back into the cliff face. This dig has yet to be given a name or a suggested name but also appears promising. Evidence of packrat dens, further air pockets, and some popcorn were found on the first day of digging. New caver Kira Belle performed particularly admirably in pushing the belly crawl back.

All the while on this first large scale dig operation, I was doing almost no honest labor! I made coffee in the morning, which I consumed almost all of, and “gave encouragement“ to the diggers until lunch. A simple sausage alfredo pasta was doled out to the vast, swarming mass of diggers just as the sun was setting. With big ol’ smiles and kicking feet dangling from our perches on the cliff’s edge, we found the truest virgin passage of all: The friends we made along the way!

It’s one of these little known sites that captured my most fervent interest on the trip: The Nogales Cliff Dwellings. These cliff dwellings were built by a suspicious, closed off people called the Gallina. They lived across a handful of isolated, highly defensible sites in northern New Mexico between 1100 and 1300 AD. No modern tribes in the area claim descent from the Gallina but a story passed through the oral tradition of the Jemez people tells of a great massacre being perpetrated upon their people by duplicitous cliff dwellers in the area. The Jemez tell of reacting genocidally; Slaughtering all of these treacherous people, taking their land, and shunning their old dwellings. Modern anthropologists of the American Southwest connect this story to the sudden disappearance of the Gallina people circa 1300. Although Gallina sites are considerably less well studied compared to their Anasazi, Mogollon, or Hohokam neighbors, what excavations have been pursued have unearthed evidence of a sudden, violent end: Bodies heaped into mass graves, scorched and collapsed dwellings, and unhealed injuries. The Nogales Cliff Dwellings are indicative of a typical Gallina site: walls in the same style as the famous Chacoans but much thicker, situated in highly defensible and isolated positions. They were a very Puebloan-like people, probably fleeing from the increasingly violent and unstable end of the Chacoan system like those that founded the settlement at Bandelier National Monument.

The Nogales Cliff Dwellings are constructed in a natural sandstone semi circle stratified across three layers. The two upper levels, on my visit, proved inaccessible due to a fresh layer of snow making navigating the precipitous ledges particularly dangerous. The lower level contains ample storage space, the ruins of a room with a grain processing system, and a kiva. The layer above, in the best condition of the three, contains a two story tower underneath a large overhang. Although impossible to reach without a rope or ladder, one can make out intact wooden beams holding up the roof. Above that is the remains of a tower guarding the approach to the second level.

The site also contains some exceedingly odd karst features despite being in sandstone. On the first level, behind the Kiva, are two belly crawl tunnels extending 15 maybe 20 feet into the sandstone cliff face. A third hole to the left of the lower dwelling has a 5 to 6 foot entryway extending 3 to 4 feet into the cliff face followed by a 20 foot long belly crawl.

A fourth hole on the second level is visible in the top left of the above photograph. I tried for two hours to reach it but it involved creeping along the edge of a precipitous drop covered in snow. I decided against trying to access it further because I was alone and a significant injury would have been disastrous. I achieved a vantage point as high as possible opposite from the upper cliff dwellings and just barely thought I could make out light coming from a bend to the right in the nearly inaccessible tunnel. My thought is that this tunnel might connect with the second level of the cliff dwelling.

Of the three tunnels that I crawled through, all three were blocked by large rocks of a different variety than the cliff face is composed of and continued forward with a couple inches of airspace as far as my phone flashlight could penetrate. The site map, curiously, does not include a survey of these features. Instead, the only hole that registered to the site surveyors was the inaccessible one in the top left of the photograph above and is shown penetrating perhaps 5 feet into the cliff face. What my own eyes could see tells me that this isn’t so.

This site is a post-Chacoan site somewhat near Bandelier National Monument. Man made “cavelets“ were a common feature in the soft rock of the region but this site is different. The cavelets at Bandaleir are generally big enough to have 2 or 3 grown people sitting up. They’re quite large and normally feature free standing structures at their entrances. These long belly crawls couldn’t have served a residential purpose like those at Bandelier and the Nogales Dwellings already had enough free standing storage to accommodate the relatively few people who lived there.

Whether these caves are natural or manmade is hard to say. The two situated behind the Kiva in the lower dwelling bore no discernible evidence of passage enlargement. The two to the left of the photograph, could be artificially enlarged at their entrances.

In the light of the setting sun I investigated the other holes I could find in the area of the site. A couple holes way up high just south of the cliff dwellings looked like promising natural formations but, again, were to high for me to feel comfortable accessing alone. I should like to plan a trip here to survey the cliff dwellings as well as the cave features.