In the shadow of Pikes Peak, the historic Cave of the Winds north of Manitou Springs offers several tours to fit all skill levels. Developed in 1881 as the region’s first attraction, the cave annually hosts over 180,000 visitors from all over the world. For many, the three-quarter mile Discovery Tour provides a satisfying excursion. With a paved trail and electric lights, visitors examine most of the cave’s better-known chambers, including Canopy Hall, opened in 1881, the Temple of Silence, opened in 1929, and the Valley of Dreams, opened in 1935. The Adventure Room, opened in 1987, serves as the turn-around point for Discovery Tour groups. It is the starting point for the Lantern Tour, which follows corridors deeper into Temple Mountain.
Lantern Tour visitors use hand held lanterns to light their way, providing
an opportunity to experience the cave as did 19 th century visitors.
Winding through the mountain, the tour follows pathways in the long-closed
Manitou Grand Cavern, a former competitor to the Cave of the Winds. Publicly
exhibited from 1885 to1906, the Grand Caverns was the more popular of
the two commercial attractions in the 1890s. It fame attracted such notables
as General William Tecumseh Sherman. From the cave’s former entrance
room, visitors pass towering stone monuments erected in the late 1880s
to Presidents Ulysses Grant, Abraham Lincoln and General Robert E. Lee.
The tour visits the Opera House, Lover’s Lane and the airy Grand
Concert Hall, one of Colorado’s largest underground chambers.
The Cave of the Winds offers a third tour by reservation to another former
commercial cave, Manitou Cave. Opened in 1912, Manitou Cave lasted only two
seasons before being bought out and closed by its better-known rival. Tour
groups today follow a portion of the original tour route (part of which is
believed to be buried from a 1921 flood) before climbing and squeezing through
a tight crawlway into the Deepwater Section, discovered in 1991. More spacious
than the former commercial section, Deepwater occasionally has a trickle of
water that fills a small pool. Another option is to squeeze through a low crawl
into the Centipede Section, a part of the cave known by local schoolboys in
the late 1890s. It was closed by order of the Manitou City Council in 1909
after a Kansas visitor caught her hair on fire with a candle she was holding.
In the rush to put out the flames, the group’s candles were extinguished,
leaving them to crawl blindly in the dark until they discovered the cave’s
entrance.
Today’s underground visitors usually don’t use candles, preferring instead electric headlamps, hardhats and other suitable cave exploring gear. While such gear is readily available from outdoor stores, some visitors instead use handheld flashlights, which invariably are dropped and broken or run out of battery power, leaving its users in the dark.