Colorado
What is the “Cyclopean Cave” — and why are these guys hauling buckets of Colorado mud to find it?
Story first appeared in:
LEADVILLE — “It’s easy digging, but it’s scary as hell down there,” says Wes Devenyns, who is covered, helmet to boot, in mud.
“What’s so scary?” his pals atop the dark entrance of the historic mine shaft ask.
“The timbers,” he says. “Don’t touch the timbers.”
“Don’t even look at ’em. I mean, they were installed in the 1800s,” says Mike Frazier, who appears unbothered by the mud speckling his eyeglasses. “They are just kind of floating above you. But hey, this is what I like about caves. Finding places that so few people will ever see.”
Sure, this could be the mythological cave. Or it could be a hole full of mud. Cave digging is never a certainty.
— Wes Devenyns, spelunker
Right now, eight avid spelunkers are hauling buckets of mud and rocks up from the bottom of a hole, pulling together on a haul rope every few minutes. They’ve been digging here sporadically for a few years and they’ve cleared the mine shaft to a depth around 45 feet.
They are in the middle of a conifer forest near Leadville. The private land is dotted with prospecting holes where miners in the 1800s dug in search of gold, silver and precious metals. But this hole is littered with black shale. Down the mountain is a long-collapsed cabin next to what looks like a horizontal bore that accesses the mine shaft.
These are signs that this particular mine shaft is the entrance to a long-lost cave that some say is a myth made up by a newspaper reporter who occasionally veered into fiction.
“Sure, this could be the mythological cave. Or it could be a hole full of mud. Cave digging is never a certainty,” Devenyns says.
“Hoax, Humbug and Orth Stein.”
Orth Stein was a pioneer journalist at the just-launched Leadville Carbonate Weekly Chronicle in the late 1800s. He was prone to tall tales. (This was not uncommon in that age of news. Mark Twain was a young newspaper reporter in the 1860s, spinning yarns of dubious veracity in California and Nevada.)
One of Stein’s stories described a fully intact wooden ship, with two giant masts, embedded deep in a granite cave beneath Battle Mountain near Red Cliff. Another Stein report in the Leadville Chronicle in 1884 described “a hideous visitor” and “sea serpent” frightening residents around Twin Lakes.
So, not surprisingly, his reports of a vast series of caverns he called the Cyclopean Cave, which were written mere weeks after his ship-in-a-cave dispatch from Battle Mountain, were easily dismissed as fiction.
In the 1973 book “Caves of Colorado,” a sort of bible for spelunkers, author and caving pioneer Lloyd Parris included the Cyclopean Cave in a chapter titled “Hoax, Humbug and Orth Stein.” Parris cited previous reports calling the Cyclopean Cave an invention by “a bored newspaper reporter in Leadville in the 1880s.” In the early 1900s, a memoir published by Stein’s boss, Leadville newspaper editor C.C. Davis, described the Cyclopean Cave as “fiction from headlines to tailpiece.”
Across the globe, exploring spelunkers have investigated and proved the existence of mythical caves and the potential of the Cyclopean Cave being a hoax did not deter Colorado caver Richard Rhinehart.
Rhinehart, the editor of Rocky Mountain Caving Journal and author of several books on Colorado’s caves, and a crew of cave-crawling geologists spent several years poring over Stein’s newspaper reports as well as studying the geology around Leadville.
Stein described a miner near Leadville who was down digging in a shaft when he broke through and fell into a dark room.
“A guy disappeared down in the darkness and ended up on a ledge down below … so he calls up from below ‘Hell is not a half-mile off,’” Rhinehart says as he hauls on the mud-slicked rope on a recent Sunday afternoon. “And his colleague up here somewhere helps him climb back up. They probably drank some whiskey. They said they needed to get the nerve to go back down with candles and explore.”
Stein spoke with those miners, and the articles published in October 1880 described the shaft as 52-feet deep when the miner broke into the cavern, which held “thousands upon thousands” of stalactites. Stein wrote that month about joining several Leadville residents — all real people — in the cavern and “their wonder and delight was very great.”
He described a spring, stream, lake and a petrified waterfall he called “hushed Niagara.” Stein included a map of the cave in an Oct. 30, 1880, article in the Leadville paper titled “Marvelous. The Mammoth Cave of Colorado” that described “the first exploration of its bewildering labyrinths.” Stein described one chamber — Stein Gallery, he called it — as something akin to the galleries of the Vatican “bathed in moonlight.”
This story first appeared in
Colorado Sunday, a premium magazine newsletter for members.
Experience the best in Colorado news at a slower pace, with thoughtful articles, unique adventures and a reading list that’s a perfect fit for a Sunday morning.
Artist illustrations for the article show miners holding torches and panning for gold in the underwater river Stein called the “River Styx.” Upon returning from the cave on horseback, Stein describes seeing the lights of Leadville and thinking that his home city “not only surpasses the world in her mineral wealth, but possesses a natural cavern which will for years furnish food for thought and curiosity.”
Stein said the owner of the property was “negotiating with London capitalists for the sale and full development” of the Cyclopean Cave. Leadville was a booming silver town in the 1880s, with a population of more than 30,000 supporting saloons, brothels, hotels, restaurants and a new opera house.
Rhinehart spent many months tracking down the name of every person mentioned in Stein’s Cyclopean Cave articles and each was a known resident with a lengthy history in Leadville.
More articles in the years that followed noted local residents exploring the cave in the early 1900s. Rhinehart has found articles mentioning Cyclopean Cave visits in 1941.
Rhinehart suspects the cave was a bit of a bummer for miners who wanted precious minerals, not a tourist destination. Hence the cave’s fade into local Leadville lore.
“I’m sure it was exciting when they found this cave but it was also probably a disappointment because it was not some big vein,” Rhinehart says. “They were miners, not cavers.”
Cavers are curious explorers. In a previous life, they were the adventurers who sailed the seas to find new civilizations and in the future, perhaps they will sail into space, says Rhinehart, who has discovered new caves and chambers over several decades of spelunking.
“It’s exciting to investigate something that has never before been seen by anyone,” he says. “It’s been more than 80 years since the Cyclopean Cave has been visited. In that time, it’s been labeled as fiction by historians and media, based upon incorrect information. To reopen the cave will help set the record straight.”
In 2021, after several days scouring the area, Rhinehart and his friends found that pile of black Belden shale on the private parcel. The shale means the shaft had breached a layer dozens of feet below that stretches from Leadville across Battle Mountain to the old mines around the ghost town of Gilman.
It’s been more than 80 years since the Cyclopean Cave has been visited. In that time, it’s been labeled as fiction by historians and media, based upon incorrect information. To reopen the cave will help set the record straight.
— Richard Rhinehart, spelunker
More than three years ago they brought in ropes, hoists and equipment and started clearing the shaft, noting airflow as they carefully descended and removed trees and logs blocking the hole. After many days of digging since 2021, they suspect they are very close to the caverns of the Cyclopean Cave.
“I swear I felt air flowing out of there today,” Rhinehart says.
“Always up for a little adventure”
LEFT: Mike Frazier pulls on a rope with others to haul up dirt out of a mine shaft on Sept. 22, 2024 in Leadville. RIGHT: Wes Devenyns, left, and Mike Frazier lower a handbuilt safety shelter into the mine shaft. (Rebecca Slezak, Special to The Colorado Sun)
TOP: Mike Frazier pulls on a rope with others to haul up dirt out of a mine shaft on Sept. 22, 2024 in Leadville. BOTTOM: Wes Devenyns, left, and Mike Frazier lower a handbuilt safety shelter into the mine shaft. (Rebecca Slezak, Special to The Colorado Sun)
Rhinehart and his fellow explorers reached out to the property’s owner when they first found the mine shaft they suspect leads to the Cyclopean Cave.
“It’s always a scary thing to call an owner and say there’s a big cave on your property. They could tell us to never come back. They could close it down,” Rhinehart says.
But this owner, who bought the 42-acre mining claim near Leadville in the 1980s, says he has “always been up for a little adventure.”
“So I was happy for some exploring without actually having to leave home,” said the landowner, who asked that The Sun not publish his name or the location of the mine entrance “just yet.” (He’s wary that visitors may come exploring and get hurt, reflecting a growing concern among landowners in Colorado. All the digging cavers who visit his property sign liability waivers.)
The owner has hiked “every inch” of his property and nothing about the mine shaft ever seemed different than the many other prospector holes. The cavers pointed out the shale and a debris collapse exposing the shaft’s timbers. The owner now joins Rhinehart and his fellow cavers in hopes that maybe this is the entrance to the Cyclopean.
He’s keen to enter the cave if the shaft connects to caverns. If it is something “big and spectacular,” maybe there will be some sort of opportunities to host visitors, he says. Maybe nearby tourist operations in the Upper Arkansas River Valley would be interested in offering tours, he says.
“But that’s a long way away,” he says. “Let’s see what happens.”
The owner and his dog often join the cavers on their digs. He helps pull on the haul rope and enjoys the company of the well-traveled scientists and explorers. The conversation is riveting as they talk about discovering new caves and exploring Colorado’s darkest corners.
They talk about Groaning Cave, which cavers found in 1968 and is the longest in Colorado with a length of tunnels and caverns reaching 14.7 miles in the White River National Forest. They talk about how the hard-to-reach and ropes-required Fixin’-To-Die Cave in Garfield County is aptly named.
Frazier talks about spending seven hours last year navigating 57 rope drops into one of the deepest caves in the world, Abismo Batavia in Oaxaca, Mexico. He’s featured prominently in a full-length documentary detailing that 2023 expedition. He owns Cave of the Clouds in Glenwood Canyon. He dreams about retreating into a cave with his partner “and becoming cave hermits.”
“Most of the caves that are considered hoaxes, I think really exist,” he says.
In Colorado now it’s to the point where there’s still stuff out there to be found, but there’s more stuff to be found by digging at the back of caves that are already known.
— Mike Frazier, spelunker
He’s found caves that were considered lost or forgotten. Like the Cave Creek Cavern near Fairplay, which contains the largest known cave room in the state.
“The potential here is pretty fantastic,” Frazier says. “All the signs are right. But honestly, we could be in the wrong spot. You just don’t know. In Colorado now it’s to the point where there’s still stuff out there to be found, but there’s more stuff to be found by digging at the back of caves that are already known. I’m not saying this is not going to happen. I’m saying it’s not going to be easy.”
If Stein’s reports are correct, the mine shaft was about 50 feet deep and the cavers have plumbed close to that.
Fred Luiszer, who wrote his geology doctoral dissertation at the University of Colorado on the “Genesis of the Cave of the Winds” near Manitou Springs, specializes in speleology. He estimates he’s been on “more than a thousand mine digs” in his life. He makes sure that is not interpreted as his involvement in the discovery of more than 1,000 caves.
“But more often than not,” he says of his exploratory digs, “they are fruitful.”
Luiszer feels confident about this dig. The historical record, the layers of shale from deep below piled in the forest, the wooden beams in the shaft and the tunnel approaching the shaft from down the hill are signs that they are nearing a cave, he says.
He grabs a rock from the bucket that’s discolored and oxidized and calls it “a keeper.” The staining on the chunk of sparkling porphyry indicates hydrothermal activity below. Another sign, he says.
“Either way, this is character building,” the septuagenarian says, leaning into the rope to haul up the next bucket of mud and rocks.
Leading the Way
Nate the Great
MacKinnon is tied for fifth in the NHL in points (10), while ranking tied for seventh in goals (4) and tied for ninth in assists (6).
All Hail Cale
Cale Makar is tied for first in goals (4) among NHL defensemen,
Toewser Laser
Among NHL blueliners, Devon Toews is tied for third in points (7) while ranking tied for fifth in assists (5) and tied for sixth in goals (2).
Series History
The Avalanche and Wild have met in the playoffs on three previous occasions, all in the Round One, with Minnesota winning in 2003 and 2014 in seven games while Colorado was victorious in six contests in 2008.
Making Plays Against Minnesota
MacKinnon has posted 16 points (4g/12a) in nine playoff games against the Wild, in addition to 70 points (27g/43a) in 55 regular-season contests.
Makar has registered three points (2g/1a) in two playoff contests against Minnesota, along with 26 points (6g/20a) in 29 regular-season games.
Necas has recorded five points (1g/4a) in two playoff games against the Wild, in addition to nine points (5g/4a) in 15 regular-season games.
Scoring in the Twin Cities
Quinn Hughes is tied for the Wild lead in points (11) and assists (8) while ranking tied for second in goals (3).
Kaprizov is tied for first on the Wild in assists (8) and points (11) while ranking tied for second in goals (3).
Matt Boldy leads the Wild in goals (6) while ranking third in points (10) and tied for fourth in assists (4).
A Numbers Game
4.50
Colorado’s 4.50 goals per game on the road in the playoffs are tied for the most in the NHL.
39
MacKinnon’s 39 playoff goals since 2020-21 are the second most in the NHL.
2.17
The Avalanche’s 2.17 goals against per game in the playoffs are the second fewest in the NHL.
Quote That Left a Mark
“It should definitely get you up and excited. It’s gonna be a good test. [It’s a] great building and [it’s] against a desperate team. It’s gonna be great.”
— Gabriel Landeskog on playing in Minnesota
Colorado
Colorado Gov. Jared Polis signs state budget, with Medicaid taking brunt of cuts to close $1.5 billion gap
Colorado Gov. Jared Polis on Friday, May 8, signed into law a $46.8 billion state budget that cuts healthcare spending but preserves funding for K-12 education.
The budget applies to the 2026-27 fiscal year, which begins on July 1, and caps months of work by lawmakers, who wrestled with how to close a roughly $1.5 billion gap that ultimately forced reductions to Medicaid funding and other programs.
“This year was incredibly difficult and challenged each of us in a myriad of ways that put our values to the test,” said Rep. Emily Sirtota, a Denver Democrat and chair of the bipartisan Joint Budget Committee, which crafts the state’s spending plan before it is voted on by the full legislature. “It’s a zero-sum game. A dollar here means a dollar less over here.”
The state’s spending gap was the result of several factors.
The legislature is limited in how it can spend under the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, or TABOR, an amendment to the state constitution approved by voters in 1992 that limits government revenue growth to the rate of population growth plus inflation.
Lawmakers are also dealing with the consequences of increased spending on programs they created or expanded in recent years, some of which have seen their costs balloon beyond their original estimates. Costs for Medicaid services, in particular, have surged, driven by inflation, expanded benefits and greater demand for expensive, long-term care services due to Colorado’s aging population.
Medicaid cuts
Medicaid recently eclipsed K-12 education as the single-largest chunk of the state’s general fund and now accounts for roughly one-third of all spending from that fund.
Lawmakers, who are required by the state constitution to pass a deficit-free budget, said they had no choice but to cut Medicaid funding as a result.
That includes a 2% reduction to the state’s reimbursement rate for most Medicaid providers. The budget also institutes a $3,000 cap on adult dental benefits, limits billable hours for at-home caregivers of family members with severe disabilities to 56 hours per week and phases out, by Jan. 1, automatic enrollment for children with disabilities to receive 24/7 care as adults.
The budget also cuts benefits and places new limits on Cover All Coloradans, a program created by the legislature in 2022 that provides identical coverage as Medicaid to low-income immigrant children and pregnant women, regardless of their immigration status.
That includes an end to long-term care services for new enrollees, a $1,100 limit on dental benefits, and an annual enrollment cap of 25,000 for children 18 or younger. The cuts come as spending on the program has grown more than 600% beyond its original estimate, going from roughly $14.7 million to an estimated $104.5 million for the 2025-26 fiscal year.
While the budget still represents an overall increase in Medicaid spending compared to this year, funding is roughly half of what it would have been had lawmakers not made any changes to benefits and provider rates, which total about $270 million in savings for the state.
Healthcare leaders say the cuts will exacerbate an already challenging environment for providers, who are bracing for less federal support after Congress last year passed sweeping Medicaid cuts and declined to renew enhanced subsidies for the Affordable Care Act.
For rural hospitals in particular, Medicaid is one of their key funding drivers.
“While a 2% (Medicaid reimbursement rate cut) doesn’t sound like a whole lot, when we already have close to 50% of our rural hospitals statewide operating in the red and 70% with unsustainable margins, facing another 2% (cut) on top of that is just devastating,” said Michelle Mills, CEO for the Colorado Rural Health Center, which represents rural hospitals on the Western Slope and Eastern Plains.
If the state provides less reimbursement for Medicaid services, Mills said it will lead to fewer providers accepting Medicaid plans. That in turn will mean fewer care options for people, particularly in Colorado’s rural counties, where healthcare services are already more limited.
“I feel like all of the decisions and cuts that they’re making are hitting everyone,” she said.
Rep. Rick Taggart, a Grand Junction Republican and budget committee member, said cuts to healthcare led to “a lot of tears.”
“This was a tough budget, and nobody won in this budget, but we did what we had to do by way of the (state) constitution,” he said.
While Medicaid saw some of the biggest cuts, lawmakers also trimmed spending from a suite of other programs, including financial aid for adoptive parents and grants providing mental health support for law enforcement.
Preserving K-12 education
One of the brighter spots for Polis and lawmakers in the budget is K-12 education.
After years of chronically underfunding the state’s schools, lawmakers in 2024 rolled out a revamped funding formula and abolished what was known as the budget stabilization factor, a Great Recession-era mechanism that had allowed the state to skirt its constitutional funding obligation to schools for more than a decade.
The new funding formula went into effect this school year, and the state is set to continue delivering higher levels of K-12 funding in the 2026-27 fiscal year budget. The budget allocates roughly $10.19 billion in K-12 funding, an increase of roughly $194.8 million, though the specifics of that spending are still being worked out in a separate bill, the 2026 School Finance Act, which has yet to pass the legislature.
The finance act guides how state and local funds are allocated to Colorado’s 178 school districts on a per-pupil basis. As it stands now, the bill is on track to increase per-pupil funding by $440 per student for the 2026-27 fiscal year, for a total of $12,314 per student.
“We are not returning to the days of underfunding our schools and a budget stabilization factor,” Polis said.
Still, there are challenges on the horizon for some districts.
Combined with a proposed three-year averaging model for student counts instead of the current four-year averaging, recent dips in student enrollment across the state will weigh more heavily on how much funding is allocated to each district. The shift to three-year averaging advances the state’s plan to gradually phase in the new school finance formula by 2030-31.
With several districts seeing decreased year-over-year enrollment and rising operational expenses like healthcare, some Western Slope school districts are poised to see less funding compared to this year, while others are seeing their increases eaten up by inflation.
A note on wolves
The topic of Colorado’s spending on gray wolf reintroduction hasn’t gone away, and while Medicaid headlined much of the budget discussions, lawmakers also used the spending plan to send a message on the future of the wolf program.
While the budget allocates $2.1 from the general fund to Colorado Parks and Wildlife to spend on wolf reintroduction, it also contains a footnote from lawmakers asking the agency not to use the money to acquire new wolves.
Footnotes are not legally binding, but rather serve as a direction or guidance from lawmakers to agencies on how they want certain funds spent.
Under the footnote, the wildlife agency could still use gifts, grants, donations and non-license revenue from its wildlife cash fund to bring additional wolves to Colorado. Most of the agency’s wolf funding goes toward personnel, followed by operating costs, compensation for ranchers and conflict minimization programs and tools.
Education reporter Andrea Teres-Martinez and wildlife and environmental reporter Ali Longwell contributed to this story.
A widespread cyberattack targeting the learning platform Canvas is disrupting thousands of schools across the country, including in Colorado. It’s hitting students at one of the worst possible times: finals week.
Cybercriminal group ShinyHunters claimed credit for the attack, breaching systems tied to Instructure, the company that runs Canvas. Canvas is used by 41% of higher education institutions across the country to deliver courses. Millions of K-12 students rely on the platform as well.
In Colorado, more than 20 schools, including Colorado School of Mines, Metropolitan State University of Denver, the University of Denver, the University of Colorado Boulder, Colorado State University, and the University of Northern Colorado, have been affected by the cybersecurity attack.
The group is attempting to extort the company, threatening to release massive amounts of student data if demands are not met.
For students like Flannery Headley, a political science major at MSU Denver, the disruption is more than an inconvenience — it’s a major source of stress.
“The moment I tried to click on something, it gave me this maintenance down page,” she said. “I started Googling things, and I saw this whole thing about the hack.”
Headley says she was working on assignments when Canvas suddenly stopped functioning.
MSU sent out guidance telling students not to log into Canvas and to wait for updates from professors.
Like many students, Headley is now left in limbo, unsure how finals will be submitted or graded.
“This final I’ve spent the last week working on might not matter,” she said. “At least one of my grades is hinging on another final, whether I’m going to pass or fail.”
The attackers claim to have stolen large amounts of data, including names, student ID numbers, email addresses, and academic records.
Experts say the real risk may not just be disruption, but what happens next.
“The worst they could do is release it,” said MSU Denver computer science professor Steve Beaty. “There’s been minor leaks and breaches and these sorts of things from time to time, but nothing on the scale of this.”
Beatty says the group claims to have terabytes of student data, which could include personally identifiable information protected under federal privacy laws. If released, that information could be used for scams, identity theft, or further cyberattacks.
Canvas is a cloud-based system used by thousands of institutions, meaning a single attack can have massive ripple effects.
“They took the entire Canvas infrastructure down,” Beatty said. “That affects about 9,000 schools, tens of thousands of people in Colorado alone.”
Right now, schools are scrambling to find workarounds, from email submissions to alternative testing methods.
There is no current timeline for resolution. The hacker group has set a May 12 deadline for the company to respond before potentially releasing the data.
Until then, students like Headley are left waiting, hoping their work doesn’t disappear.
“I’m going to keep working on my finals,” she said, “but I’m not sure what that’s going to look like.”
-
News21 minutes agoFrontier Airlines plane hits person on runway during takeoff at Denver airport
-
New York2 hours agoMan Dies in Subway Attack; Mamdani Orders Inquiry Into Suspect’s Release From Bellevue
-
Detroit, MI2 hours agoPatchy dense fog turns to stronger thunderstorms for Metro Detroit to start the weekend
-
San Francisco, CA3 hours agoWhere to watch Pittsburgh Pirates vs San Francisco Giants: TV channel, start time, streaming for May 9
-
Dallas, TX3 hours agoFC Dallas vs Real Salt Lake Preview: Lineups, Storylines & What to Watch
-
Miami, FL3 hours agoMiami Area Gets First New Manufactured Home Community in Decades
-
Boston, MA3 hours agoWhat we know about wrong-way driver killed in head-on collision with state trooper in Lynnfield – The Boston Globe
-
Denver, CO3 hours agoA Frontier plane hits a pedestrian during takeoff at Denver airport