Happy Colorado Sunday, friends!
I guess we’ve come to an abrupt close to the gloriously long summer, and are now permitted to retreat to the restfulness of the shoulder season. This is the perfect time to engage in a bit of armchair exploration and plot future adventures.
I got started on the exercise a few days early last week, editing Jason Blevins’ cover story about the long-lost Cyclopean Cave near Leadville. Fact-checking took me deep into the rabbit hole of Leadville’s boomtown history, where it seems that every famous outlaw, lawman, merchant and entertainer of the period staked a claim, if only for a moment. The charm of the town, elevation 10,154 feet, is ever present. But reading about the colorful people who helped shape it — including a journalist who may or may not have made up a story about visiting a spectacular cave in the vicinity — set me thinking about heading to Cloud City again.
Editor
The Cover Story
Was it satire, or was it honest spelunking?
In the late 1870s, an eager young journalist named Orth Stein landed in booming Leadville. There were nearly 30,000 people in the rowdy mining town back then, with dozens of saloons, brothels and gambling halls.
The Louisiana teenager set to his job with vigor. He exposed graft and fake doctors. His withering critiques toppled elected officials. And, as was the trend back then for newspaper writers, he told some tall tales. The “sea serpent” haunting residents of Twin Lakes. A full-masted ship locked in a granite cave beneath Battle Mountain.
(Only a few years ahead of Stein, one of the world’s greatest satirists, with the freshly minted nom de plume of Mark Twain, was spinning wild yarns as a newspaper reporter in Nevada and California.)
So it was quite easy for historians to dismiss Stein’s dispatch from a large cave just outside Leadville, in which he told of an underground waterfall and river, glistening stalactites in a cavern akin to Vatican galleries “bathed in moonlight.” Stein even included sketches in his reports, as well as the names of several Leadville luminaries who accompanied his cavern-crawling adventures.
Still, Stein’s own editor said the so-called Cyclopean Cave was “fiction from headlines to tailpiece.” Colorado caving pioneer Lloyd Parris, in his influential “Caves of Colorado” guidebook, included the Cyclopean in a chapter titled “Hoax, Humbug and Orth Stein.”
But what about those vivid details in Stein’s stories? The names of all those fellow explorers. The sketches. Stein’s historical prose enthralled contemporary Colorado cavers like Richard Rhinehart. He and his fellow spelunkers crawled around Leadville. They studied geology and pored over areas that could be cave-y.
A few years back, on a private parcel near town, they spotted black Belden shale near a collapsed hole. Someone had dug deep there, reaching a layer that often lines the entrance to caverns. Down the hill from the hole is a horizontal entrance not unlike one described by Stein. For the past few years they’ve been digging out that hole. They are pretty sure they are onto the Cyclopean and could soon be breaking into what could be one of Colorado’s greatest cave discoveries in recent memory.
“It’s exciting to investigate something that has never before been seen by anyone,” Rhinehart 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.”
READ THIS WEEK’S COLORADO SUNDAY FEATURE
Jason Blevins | Outdoors/Business Reporter
The Colorado Lens
Change is afoot in Colorado and our photojournalists captured some of it on their recent assignments. Here are some of our favorite images.
Eric Lubbers | CTO & Newsletter Wrangler
Flavor of the Week
Take a good look at the Powers Art Center
The Powers Art Center near Carbondale is easy to get to but just as easy to miss, hidden by low rolling hills just off Colorado 82. A short, winding driveway delivers visitors to the building, itself worth pausing to marvel over. Designed by Tokyo-based architect Hiroshi Nanamori and Glenn Rappaport of Basalt, the center’s exterior features an L-shaped reflecting pool and latticed columns that perfectly frame the other side of the valley, including a prominent view of Mount Sopris. The quiet ripples of water tucked away from the whoosh of highway traffic makes the unassuming roadside entrance feel less like an afterthought and more by design.
And that’s just the outside.
Inside is the private collection of John and Kimiko Powers, patrons and friends of some of the most prominent artists of the 1950s and ’60s including, but not limited to, Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Christo and Jean-Claude and Issey Miyake, to name a few.
The first wall a visitor encounters features a set of Warhol portraits of John and Kimiko themselves. Upstairs, in a permanent display dedicated to Jasper Johns’ works on paper, you can find small notes in Johns’ Numbers series: “For Kimiko — Happy Birthday, 1988.”
The downstairs display rotates every few months. The current exhibition is called “Wrapped,” and features the fabric-based creations of Miyake and Christo and Jean-Claude, including a ripped piece of “Valley Curtain,” a 1,250-foot wide curtain that briefly hung across the Rifle Gap, a popular sport-climbing canyon north of the town of Rifle. “Valley Curtain” took 28 months for Christo and Jean-Claude to complete, and was torn down 28 hours after being hung due to high winds.
The collection is studded with personal notes, elevating it from simply an impressive contemporary art collection to a glimpse into an intimate art world. Next time you’re driving in the Roaring Fork Valley past Carbondale, keep an eye out for the small road sign subtly announcing the Powers Art Center. It’s definitely worth a look.
The Powers Art Center is free and open 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Tuesday-Friday and 11 a.m.-3 p.m. on Saturday.
Parker Yamasaki | Reporter
SunLit: Sneak Peek
“Fountain Creek” traces history, environmental challenges of a unique waterway
EXCERPT: For Jim O’Donnell, the Fountain was a playground from his youth, but also, years later, a fascinating study of water in the American West. His new book “Fountain Creek: Big Lessons from a Little River,” explores the flow from all angles — historical, environmental and deeply personal. In this excerpt, he poignantly describes revisiting the creek, discovering a dismantled beaver pond and then struggling to recreate what had been torn apart.
THE SUNLIT INTERVIEW: O’Donnell explains how he revisited his childhood haunts along the Fountain while also mapping a route that took him the entire length of the creek and its tributaries. He also delved into the waterway’s history to produce a portrait that captures the unique nature of a creek that meanders alongside Interstate 25 before connecting with the Arkansas River in Pueblo. Here’s a portion of his Q&A:
SunLit: What is your vision for the future of Fountain Creek?
O’Donnell: This is a difficult one and my answer is going to make a number of good folks angry, I imagine. First, the whole way we relate to our waterways in the American West (and arguably around the world) really needs to change. We need to start seeing the creek as being not unlike us. We need to understand the creek as a sentient being with its own desires and personality. If we can get to that point, we can start showing the creek some respect.
READ THE INTERVIEW WITH JIM O’DONNELL
Kevin Simpson | Writer
Sunday Reading List
A curated list of what you may have missed from The Colorado Sun this week.
🌞 Turns out there are organizations that specialize in tracking staff turnover in congressional offices and no, they’re not some kind of Glassdoor for politicians. Stability matters and suggests the work of the office is focused on constituents rather than training new staffers. Jesse Paul looked at the reports for our delegation and, well, the news is not good in U.S. Rep. Yadira Caraveo’s office, and Rep. U.S. Jason Crow has had a bad year, too.
🌞 Speaking of the 8th Congressional District, the spending in the race between Caraveo and her Republican challenger, state Rep. Gabe Evans, is in the neighborhood of $20 million so far, Jesse Paul reports.
🌞 Meanwhile in another race in the 8th, there is a lot at stake for charter schools in the run for the State Board of Education seat open in the district. Erica Breunlin lays out the equation.
🌞There is one county clerk in Colorado who has recent experience with ranked choice voting. We have a Q&A with Boulder County Clerk and Recorder Molly Fitzpatrick, who explains what she thinks will happen if Proposition 131 passes.
🌞 I didn’t believe it when he said it, but Tamara Chuang has the details on what, exactly, Kroger CEO Rodney McMullen meant when he said, during the trial trying to block his company’s merger with Albertsons, that he never thinks about raising prices.
🌞 Is sweeping away encampments occupied by homeless people an effective deterrent to crime in the neighborhood? Jennifer Brown reported on a study of 300 sweeps in Denver that suggests it doesn’t work the way the city expects it to.
🌞 Lots of paddleboarders and kayakers have been having fun navigating dead cottonwood trees in the shallows of Chatfield Reservoir. But Michael Booth reports the trees have grown so weak and dangerous that thousands will be taken down this winter and next.
🌞Yup. Insurance premiums for most of us will be going up in the year ahead. In a particularly good-humored story, John Ingold explains why and what some can do to avoid the price hike.
🌞 A bit of advice from Jason Blevins: Buy your ski passes now or expect to pay dearly for a walk-up ticket.
Dana Coffield | Editor
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