Glenwood Caverns and Historic Fairy Caves, Glenwood Springs, CO
N 39° 33.613 W 107° 19.169
13S E 300734 N 4381517
Located on Iron Mountain in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, the Historic Fairy Caves have been an area attraction for more than 100 years.
Waymark Code: WMD93Z
Location: Colorado, United States
Date Posted: 12/07/2011
Views: 6
Glenwood Caverns is the largest show cave open to the public in Colorado. The Historic Fairy Caves, an attraction within Glenwood Caverns Adventure Park, was a thriving tourist destination in the 1890s, thanks to Charles W. Darrow, a pioneering Glenwood Springs attorney. Darrow and his family homesteaded the top of Iron Mountain, including the cave entrance. Today, you can tour Historic Fairy Caves as a part of the Cave Tour.
Darrow opened Fairy Caves to visitors in 1895. At that time the known extent of the cave was about 800 feet. Today Glenwood Caverns, including the Historic Fairy Caves, has more than 16,000 known feet. When the Fairy Caves opened to the public, visitors could get to the caves by walking up a trail, by riding a horse or burro, or by being transported in style in a horse-drawn carriage. Today, you travel to the Historic Fairy Caves in a gondola on the Iron Mountain Tramway.
Darrow installed a pathway up to the cave, and by 1897 Darrow had wires strung up the mountain from the hydroelectric plant in the town of Glenwood Springs. Glenwood Springs was a popular tourist destination during the late 1800s and was one of the first cities in the United States with electric lights. Thanks to the progressive citizens of Glenwood Springs, Fairy Caves became one of the first caverns in the world to be lit by electricity.
Today, you can see the holes in the walls of the cave where the electric lights were installed more than a hundred years ago.
In 1897 Darrow blasted a tunnel from the innermost part of the known cave to the open air looking down on the Roaring Fork Valley and the Colorado River. Today, you can stand on the same platform that Darrow built on the steep cliff high up on Iron Mountain and named Exclamation Point, and enjoy breathtaking views that extend for miles both east and west.
At the time Darrow was developing the site as a tourist destination, the scientific community knew little about the preservation of caves. Unfortunately, when heat and outside air are allowed into a cave as was done with the portion of the cave known as the Fairy Caves, the cave stops growing and living.
Today, you can experience both the Historic Fairy Caves and the living Glenwood Caverns sections of the cave that have been protected and preserved by the current owners, Steve and Jeanne Beckley. The living caves are moist, maintain a constant 52 degrees and continue to grow the stunning crystalline formations. Although the Historic Fairy Caves had been damaged by neglect, since the Beckleys have owned them and applied rigorous preservation methods, the Historic Fairy Caves are beginning to grow again.
Darrow's sons operated the cave until 1917. On the eve of America's entry into World War I, the Darrows closed the caves to the public. Historic Fairy Caves were closed for 82 years until the Beckleys, using all contemporary scientific cave preservation methods, opened them to the public in 1999.
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