Spaulding's Cavern

In the fall of 1848 a trapper named Jacob Spaulding discovered a great cavern hidden inside North Gateway Rock in the Garden of the Gods. The entrance was on the west side of the rock. It was nothing but a small, smooth hole - with barely enough room for a man to squeeze through. Once inside, Spaulding was forced to crawl upward for twenty-five feet to the floor of a large room. The room itself was some fifteen feet wide, a hundred feet high, and nearly two hundred feet long. The dirt floor was covered with the tracks of bobcat and mountain lion. A little stream of cold water trickled down from the ceiling. And everwhere inside it was dark. Not a glimmer of light shone through the solid sandstone rock.

Entrance to Spaulding's Cavern
The cavern which Spaulding discovered became quite well known as the years went by. In the summer of 1858 the Lawrence Party of gold seekers seem to have used it as shelter from the afternoon thunderstorms. The blackened traces of their campfires on the sandstone walls could be seen by later visitors for many years. One member of the Lawrence Party, a diarist named Augustus Voorhhees, carved his name on one of the cavern walls. In 1859 a young gold seeker from Illinois crawled up the narrow passageway into the great cavern; he wrote that his whispers reverberated off the cavern walls like the sounds of thunder.

For the next fifty years visitors to the Garden continued to explore the cavern's darkened passageways and to carve their names into its sandstone walls. By the turn of the century, however, the narrow entrance had become covered over with weeds and bushes, and the very existence of the cavern was forgotten. Not until 1935 was the entrance re-discovered. Plans were made to once again allow visitors inside, but the dangers of falling rock persuaded park authorities to permanently seal off access. The only way to explore Spaulding's Cavern today is through the written acounts of early visitors:


!859 - The Account of Calvin Perry Clark

1867 - The Account of Fitz Hugh Ludlow

1867 -The Account of the Hayden Survey Party

1871 -The Account of George C. Anderson

1881 -The Account of George W. Ramspert

1935 - The Re-Discovery of Spaulding's Cavern

1963 - The Cavern Entrance Erodes Open Again

Historic Names Inside Spaulding's Cavern

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