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Modern Day Cave Dwelling
This is a shot from across the stream. The entrance of the cave is in the middle of the shot. Not a bad looking spot. Ryan:
So, recap from the end of the last post: We woke up at 5:45 (tough sell in a room with no windows) to walk out to catch the bus. I know, I know, taking a bus is cheating when we're supposed to be hitchhiking around the country, but, we had to reserve our tickets for Cave of the Winds for the lantern tour in advance, so we wanted to make sure we were going to be there on time (especially since they cost us 24 dollars each, which is about 4 days worth of food when you eat like we do). Hitchhiking, turns out, can be a time consuming process, and isn't really a reliable method of getting you somewhere on a schedule.
Anyway, we had our day all planned out, we were going to get into Colorado Springs at about 8:30 in the morning, then hike out of town to go see the Manitou Cliff Dwellings, which is an old Indian town built into the cliffs, then go to the Cave of the Winds for the tour, and then hike back into town to catch our bus. Things didn't exactly go as we planned.
Andrew:
Modern Day Cave Dwelling Entrance
A close up view of the entrance, the remains of the fire is in the lower left corner. Once inside the passage narrows to about 3 feet high before opening up again. Well, we got to the bus on time, and we slept off and on during the ride out. When we got there, we jumped off a couple stops early because we realized it would be faster for us by a few blocks. We started our hike down Colorado Avenue and ended up hiking for quite some time before we reached the road where we planned to turn off.
When we had planned the trip online, we could see that we needed to cross the highway (a 4-lane road) to get to both the cliff dwellings and the springs. So, we thought we could cut across the land in-between and that everything would work out just fine. Sadly, this did not work out as we had hoped. The land in between Canon Rd. and Cliff Dwellings Rd. consisted of some steep foothills which we proceeded to hike through in an attempt to defy our lack of a car. Eventually, we came to the top of a foothill, and there was a chain-link fence with a sign about trespassing posted. Turns out we had stumbled upon an FCC tower. As much as we figured that we wouldn't get caught/fined, we decided
View from the top
This is from the top of our attempt at cutting across to get to the Cliff Dwellings. There were some houses situated up in the hills on the other side, but you can't really see them in the picture. not to cross anyway and turned around so that we could find our way to the cave in time for lunch before our tour started.
The journey to the cave started out downhill, and so we were much more pleased with it for awhile. When we were almost to the intersection of the highway and Cave of the Winds Rd. Ryan noticed a sleeping bag in the stream under the bridge we were on. After taking a bit of a closer look we saw that there was a cave that looked as though someone might have been living there. We decided to investigate since we had some extra time before we had to be at our cave tour.
Ryan:
We may not have gotten to see the ancient cave dwellings, but we found a modern day one. Nobody was home at the moment (fortunately, in all likelihood), but there was a burnt out campfire, empty beer bottles, empty boxes of food, some dog food, another sleeping bag, and all sorts of things inside. We only went in a couple rooms deep, but it appeared as though the cave kept on going for a little ways. The passageway
The highway
This is from up by our FCC tower. The bridge that we had to go under is the lighter section. The clearance on the bridge, 96 feet. to get inside was only 3 feet high or so, but once inside it was more spacious, had it not been inhabited by somebody else, it would have made a nice place to spend the night, had we been of that inclination. We decided that we shouldn't go in any further in case there were any methane pockets (there are caves filled with methane in some chambers in Minnesota, which people used to die in periodically before they were boarded off. We weren't sure if there were any out in Colorado, but without the proper equipment, we decided it would be best not to find out). Also, we weren't really keen on the idea of somebody coming home while we were inside.
Anyway, from there, we headed up to the Cave of the Winds. By this point we had decided that in the time it would take us to head all the way back around to get over to the Manitou Cliff dwellings, we would miss our tour, so we just decided that we'd be happy with the modern day cave dwelling and our FCC tower. This is another one of those times when we looked at a road
Our FCC tower
Unfortunately, trespassing and whatnot, I couldn't really get close enough to it. It's the kind of grayish looking thing in the center of the picture; basically a glorified tv antenna. map and decided it would be easy to cut across country and save ourselves a little bit of time. This is another one of those times where we were wrong. We were able to make it to the road we needed to be on just fine, but on the map it zigzagged back and forth repeatedly, and we figured we'd be able to cut through. Not so much. Turns out, in Colorado, there are these things called mountains. See, they're really really tall, and sometimes they go up really fast, and would be way too steep for a car (or a person, as it turns out) to go up. Needless to say, we had to follow the road the whole way up, and it was a long walk. We've decided to reconsider the feasability of the cut across country approach in the future.
We got up to the entrance to the cave, at about 11:15, and our tour was at one. This gave us plenty of time to eat and to sit and relax. We were both pretty shot from all of the hiking. At this point I realized that we no longer had our tickets for the tour,
Building at the cave entrance
It's kind of in the left center at the top of that hill. We had just made it to the top of the winding mountain path. The road continued along the ridge to the left (outside the picture) and over to the chalet type thing. We decided to take the road rather than try to cut across the country (a recurring theme today). and we spent a while trying to figure out where we might have lost them and how long it would take to go find them. The nearest we could figure was that we had dropped them in our modern day cave dwelling. There was no way that we were heading all the way down there, and then all the way back that hill. I went and asked if we needed to have the actual tickets with us to go on the tour or if they had a record of them, since we had purchased the tickets online. Turns out that we had dropped them somewhere at the entrance and somebody had handed them in. So, we were fine to get in anyways. We're going to talk about the cave of the winds in a separate post, because there are a lot of pictures.
Andrew:
The way back from the cave was a very nice journey compared to the hike to the cave: mostly downhill, mostly cooling down, mostly we were glad that the day was coming to an end. My feet had started to hurt by this time (I bought a new pair of hiking boots and had
View of the canyon: Part I
This is of the canyon below the chalet. It's a long drop down. Evidently people used to have to walk along the trails at the bottom of the canyon and then climb 500 wooden stairs to get to the cave entrance. been breaking them in that day), and we were both getting hungry again. Ryan really wanted to stop at a Sonic on the way back because he thinks that they spend so much money on advertising in Minnesota (there are no Sonics there) that he had to go when he saw one. I was feeling like we were crunched for time, so I disuaded him from going (much to his dismay).
We did stop at a 7/11 to fill a nalgene with some ice water and so that Ryan could buy a Gatorade (he didn't feel like having water). For most of the rest of the way back we argued about some meaningless jibberish having to do with scenerios of being abducted, put on a desert island, and hunted for sport by a millionare who would give you $X million if you escaped alive. Pretty pointless, I know.
When we got back to the stop where we had gotten off Ryan decided that he didn't feel like sitting, so we headed off towards the bus station that we would have gotten off at that morning. This turned out to be further away than he or I thought it
was, and by the time we got there we were both very tired and hungry. We made it back to Sarah's place at about 7:45 that night, ate, and watched TV for awhile before promptly passing out.
Ryan: Despite what the map may tell you (it's got the distance calculated as the bird flies), we figured out that we had walked 22 or 23 miles by the end of the day, including distance walked in the cave and in Denver. Long day.
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