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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.”

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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” 

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.