Stewart M. Green's Blog
October 16, 2023
Pioneer signatures preserved in Garden of the Gods chamber of secrets
A snowstorm ended Indian summer in the first week of November 1848. Four feet of snow blanketed the Garden of the Gods, breaking branches on oaks and plastering the cliffs. Jacob Spaulding and two fellow trappers camped nearby, after failing to find passage through the mountains before winter. The lack of forage forced the men to kill two of their mules, while the other two ate strips of pine bark and leafy boughs.
One day Spaulding waded through deep snow, following animal tracks along the base of the great northern rock. He noticed a small opening below the cliff. He felt the knife strapped to his waist, took a breath, and squeezed into the tight hole. Spaulding crawled upward over boulders and found himself on the floor of a narrow chamber. He breathed damp air and heard the steady drip of water falling from above. His eyes adjusted to the gloom, the nearest walls illuminated by a faint glimmer from the entrance.
After Spaulding’s discovery of the grotto, dubbed Spaulding’s Cavern, other visitors crawled inside and began carving names, initials, and dates into the soft sandstone sidewalls. The Lawrence Party, one of the first to inscribe names, stopped at the Garden on their two-month trek from Lawrence, Kansas to the goldfields west of Denver in 1858. The party included Julia Archibald Holmes, the first recorded woman to climb Pikes Peak, and Augustus Voorhees who incised his name.
After the Lawrence party, Spaulding’s Cavern became a popular pioneer message board. Passersby squeezed inside and engraved their names for the next 50 years. George C. Anderson described an 1871 visit. Fearing bears and rattlesnakes in the cave, his party amused themselves by “singing, hallooing, and shooting our revolvers, the report of which was deafening.” Eventually, the entrance was overgrown and by the early 20th century few people entered the cavern.
The forgotten cave was rediscovered in the 1930s. A 1935 article in the Colorado Springs Gazette-Telegraph exclaimed: “The lost cave in the Garden of the Gods has been found!” A group of men found a hole and dug it out. Inside, “The walls were carved with names and initials, which extended down to the very floor….”
They removed 75 truckloads of dirt and stone to uncover the inscriptions, which had been covered by rockfall. After a block fell from the ceiling, nearly killing a man, the City of Colorado Springs “ordered the entrance closed and barricaded, and no one is allowed to enter it.” Before the cave was sealed, a news photographer documented the names, finding a who’s who of local history, including William Henry Jackson, Mrs. Lou Frost, William Lierd, and Augustus Voorhees.
Spaulding’s Cavern remained closed until a gang of youths busted out the concrete plug blocking the cave's entrance in 1963. A few park employees entered the cave, and then promptly resealed it. Again the cave became lost, a part of Garden mythology. People heard about the mysterious sandstone cave but no one seemed to know exactly where it was located in the Garden of the Gods. In 2009, local historian Dave Hughes called for the city to open it and do an archeological excavation and document the inscriptions.
The chamber of secrets, however, remained shut tight until another group of vandals hammered out the plug in mid-2015. Afterward, they carved their names over pioneer inscriptions, including Danny McGee, who published a YouTube video of the cave.
In early June 2015, I was hiking at Garden of the Gods on a warm evening. Three visitors were stuck scrambling up Tourist Gully, a steep rock-walled crevice on the south side of North Gateway Rock. As a climber, I helped them down and warned them that if the park ranger had seen them, he would have called the Fire Department for rescue.
One of the women asked about the “cave around the corner.” I said, “Oh, that's been closed for 50 years.” She replied, “No, we saw it but were too scared to go inside.” I walked over to the west side of North Gateway Rock and sure enough, the entrance was hacked open.
The next morning I entered the cave to investigate. I crawled through a hole, then climbed stacked rubble to a room about 120 feet long, 45 to 50 feet high, and four to nine feet wide. Sandstone boulders that had fallen from the ceiling covered the cave's floor. Most of the pioneer inscriptions were engraved on the west wall. The sandstone, however, was wet with seeping water. Many of the old names were damaged by cave moisture, but I was able to find the prominent ones. Perhaps the most famous signee was pioneer photographer William Henry Jackson who etched "W.H. Jackson 1870," but most of his name is now illegible.
In the couple of hours, I spent inside Spaulding’s Cavern, I shot 398 photographs, the first photos made of the interior since 1935, of the cave and inscriptions. It was important to document this historic site dating to the earliest Anglo history of the Pikes Peak Region since it was unlikely that the cave would remain open for further analysis and I knew I wouldn't have another chance to get back into the cave.
After exiting, I called park ranger Snook Cippoletti and told him that the cave was open and dangerous, with the possibility of large blocks falling from the ceiling. He immediately cordoned off the area with yellow tape. “Someone’s been chipping away at the concrete for the past couple months,” said Snook. “It looks like they finally got through.”
Within 36 hours, a city crew resealed the cave entrance with a network of iron bars, which closed entry but allowed the cave to breathe and release moisture, which hopefully will preserve this register of historic autographs until another gang cracks the chamber open in 50 years.
The shuttered cave remains protected as a time capsule of the Pikes Peak region’s earliest history, undoubtedly containing artifacts from the Native Americans, including the Utes, who frequented the Garden of the Gods, as well as relics buried in the rubble from later explorers and pioneers.
My archive of photographs taken in Spalding's Cavern on June 4, 2015, will be preserved and archived in my collection of photographs at the Pikes Peak Library District.
This article was originally published in The Cheyenne Edition in Colorado Springs in July 2015.
April 26, 2023
Live Big: Live for the Moment
Life is a grand adventure.
It’s important to live for every moment.
To watch sunrises. To let the setting sun warm our faces at the end of the day.
To love our friends, family, lovers, partners, acquaintances, colleagues, and others fearlessly and without compromise.
To create without internal criticism and to strive to do your best, always your best.
To think great thoughts, and then write them down, paint them on a piece of wood, canvas, or paper, or shape them on stone or sand with hands and heart.
To venture into the world, the great outside, the great faraway, and then be part of that world. Touching hands to rock, feet to alpine path, fingers to black soil, voice to others out there beyond our horizon.
And more than anything else, to just be.
Be in the world. Be present. Be alive in this precious here-and-now moment that will never be again, in this precious life that is ours and ours only.
These are the important things. These are things that count, that make us better, that make us smile and dance and laugh and shout, Yes!
Just say Yes. Just dream big.
These are a few favorite things. The thoughts, feelings, and experiences that sustain us.
The things that make life a grand adventure.
The photo below is my own shout-out on the rim of Wedding Canyon after climbing Independence Monument, again, at Colorado National Monument. March 2007.
December 3, 2022
Remembering Ed Webster: Climber, Adventurer, Historian, Writer, and Photographer
I'm in complete total shock and sadness after the loss of a friend. Jimmie Dunn called me the day after Thanksgiving and told me that our wonderful longtime friend and climbing partner, Ed Webster had passed away on Tuesday, November 22, at his home in Maine.
Unaware of his passing, I had written a message to Ed on Thanksgiving Day and wished him and his family a happy Thanksgiving and said we needed to get together next year for conversation and adventure.
Damn. With tears in my eyes, I miss you, Ed.
Here is a ,link to a personal remembrance of my friend Ed Webster, one of the great climbers, mountaineers, and adventurers of the late 20th century that I wrote for ,Outside Online/Climbing/Rock & Ice.
I talked with lots of people for the article including another old friend Jimmie Dunn. Jim and I have talked a lot about Ed over the past few days. We are both still shocked by his passing.
Rest in peace, Ed.
,,Remembering Ed Webster, Desert Climber and New-Router on Everest,,(Climbing.com & OutsideOnline.com)Remembering Ed Webster, Desert Climber and New-Router on Everest
October 29, 2022
Colorado Autumn Brings Aspen Gold
Golden aspens frame storm clouds on Wilson Peak near Telluride, Colorado. Photograph by Stewart M. Green
This is the bittersweet season of the aspen gold, that gaudy curtain that showers Rocky Mountain slopes with an applause track and chorus of oohs and aahs.
The autumn aspen is the last gasp of summer warmth, of life and growth and greenery, a chance for us mortals to make merry like the carefree grasshopper, to gather in the fruits and vegetables, to rejoice in a rich harvest.
And now in mid-October, the ephemeral color is fast fading. Shiny gold leaves carpet the forest floor and float on alpine tarns. Arctic storms sweep across the high country, leaving a dusting of white. In the heights, life is already in full retreat. Pikas and marmots feather their underground nests with dry grass for winter meals. Winter coats fluff out on ptarmigans and mountain goats.
Out there, away from the highway buzz and city lights, is a world in change, bathed in a mellow glow of sunlight. I go and look and see the changing of the season, the swing of the pendulum toward cold, cloud, and gloom. Afternoon light floods across hillsides. Morning breezes ruffle dry grasses and chill my hands. And night brings a star-swept sky fringed by an outline of inky firs and spruces beyond the haloed light of my candle lantern.
Carry my bestselling book ,SCENIC DRIVING COLORADO for details, directions, and descriptions to Colorado's best autumn driving adventures.
Photographs below from left:
Chair Mountain towers over aspen-lit slopes on McClure Pass.
Afternoon light illuminates an aspen grove on Grand Mesa Scenic Byway.
Bouyant aspen leaves on a beaver pond in Oil Creek Park on Pikes Peak
All photographs by Stewart M. Green
[image error][image error][image error]October 6, 2022
NEW BOOK! Best Lake Hikes Colorado from FalconGuides
On Saturday, October 1, my fourth book of 2022—,BEST LAKE HIKES COLORADO—was released by FalconGuides.
Woohoo!! All those hikes last year to shining lakes scattered around Colorado and then the hours and days sitting at a laptop, writing chapters, making maps, and compiling photographs, pay off when a box of brand new ,BEST LAKE HIKES COLORADO books from Falcon arrives on the doorstep.
It’s always a joy to cut the box open and heft the first book out to marvel at the color images, the book’s weight, and the orderly chapters. After thumbing through every page, I think of the marvelous adventures that the book will give the reader. Since I think of my travel guides as books of dreams, those still-to-come adventures are the most important part of every book.
Like ,HIKING WATERFALLS COLORADO (2nd edition), I coauthored this new ,BEST LAKE HIKES COLORADO book with my friend and fellow Falcon author, Susan Joy Paul. Thanks, Susan, for inviting me to be part of this Colorado lake adventure.
The 328-page book, lavishly illustrated with color photographs, details 80 hikes to over 100 stellar Colorado lakes that spread around the state from prairies to plateaus to peaks. Besides glistening alpine tarns tucked below snowy peaks, the book includes plenty of lower-elevation hikes to gorgeous lakes that are accessible year-round.
It’s hard to decide which of the lake hikes in ,BEST LAKE HIKES COLORADO I liked the best since they are all memorable and the lakes at the trail’s end are always a fitting end to a footloose trek. When folks ask me, what’s your favorite lake, your favorite waterfall, or your favorite climb? I usually say, The last one I did!
Here is an Amazon link to ,BEST LAKE HIKES COLORADO.
Take a hike to a gorgeous Colorado lake!
September 29, 2022
Two Benches on Two Coasts: Street Photography Moments
I’ve always been a street photographer at heart, walking with a camera and grabbing shots as life happens on the avenue of life. And me, the image-maker being present as the surreptitious point and shooter, the fly on the wall, the documenter of people and events and moments.
Those moments are the most important thing. A frozen moment in time that will never happen again. A moment that glimpses a different world that is inhabited by unknown people that are simply going about their daily lives. Those moments tell a story to us, the viewer of the photograph. What is that person doing? Where is she from? Does he have a family? Why are they here? Here being that intersection of time and space with me, at the very moment that I click the shutter.
From the first images that I took with my first camera, a Kodak Brownie Hawkeye, in 1963 when I was ten years old on Kodak 160 black-and-white film, I documented my world. I took photographs of our flocks of geese and ducks, our black-and-white collie Rip, my brothers and sisters, my solo hikes up North Cheyenne Cañon, camping trips, and local streets and storefronts.
Later I bought my first SLR 35mm film camera, a Canon Ftb with a 50mm lens, from Jimmie Dunn in 1972 and embarked on the road to becoming a photojournalist.
Here are a couple of Kodachrome photographs that I shot on opposite sides of the continent 12 months apart. One is an image of four people, three women and a man, sitting on a Pacific Oceanside bench in San Diego in July 1977. The other photo also shows three women and a man sitting on a bench beside the Atlantic Ocean on the boardwalk in Atlantic City, New Jersey in August 1978.
I like the symmetry of these two moments—six women, two men, two benches, two oceans, 1,414 miles of distance between the two points, 12 months of elapsed time, and one photographer.
Of course, these are but two of my series of bench photographs spanning all the years since I took these shots, but these two, I like these.
August 8, 2022
NEW BOOK!! Hiking Waterfalls Colorado
My newest book ,HIKING WATERFALLS COLORADO (2nd edition) was released by FalconGuides on July 1, 2022.
Last year I worked on five book projects, four for FalconGuides and one for Every Adventure Publishing, and this year the fruits and images of my boot and keyboard labors are arriving on shelves in bookstores, on-line book retailers, and specialty shops near you. Two of the books—Hiking Colorado’s Hidden Gems and Scenic Driving California’s Pacific Coast—have already been released, while ,HIKING WATERFALLS COLORADO,, saw the light and bookshelf in early July and ,Best Lake Hikes Colorado will come out on October 1.
,HIKING WATERFALLS COLORADO was quite a journey. It began in December 2021 when my friend and fellow Falcon author Susan Joy Paul asked if I would coauthor the second edition of her book ,Hiking Waterfalls in Colorado, which came out in 2013.
Yes, of course, sure, sounds great! I replied. And then I set to work finding new waterfalls for the book, hiking out to them, making GPS tracks and map scraps, shooting photographs, and finally, sitting at my front porch office, I strung words and paragraphs into manuscripts. We also fact-checked and hiked to all of the other waterfalls in the first edition, cutting some and replacing them with more scenic ones, and making new images.
The new edition of ,HIKING WATERFALLS COLORADO is a hefty book with 352 pages that include 100 waterfall hikes to over 150 waterfalls, color photographs of the falls, and accurate maps to get hikers to the trailhead and waterfall.
I got obsessed with waterfalls last year when I worked on this book. It’s a great feeling to plod through thick woods and across flower-strewn meadows to a rushing creek. You follow the rush and tumble upstream along grassy banks and then you hear it in the distance, the roar of falling water. Hastening your steps, you push through willows past aspens and firs and then, there it is, a whitewater falls pouring off a granite cliff, pounding into a rock-rimmed plunge pool.
Sitting on a boulder at the base is restful and rejuvenating, and the flood of negative ions reduces your anxiety. You breathe deeply, filling brain and body with oxygen, thinking great thoughts, feeling buoyant and happy, and being part of the real world, far from the madding crowd and busy streets of a place you call home.
Sitting there, you think, here is my real home. See you on the trail!
June 15, 2022
NEW BOOK! Scenic Driving California's Pacific Coast
The new edition of my book ,SCENIC DRIVING CALIFORNIA’S PACIFIC COAST was officially released today, June 15, by FalconGuides. This is my second new book released this year. Two more books to go!
If you want to take a great American road trip, then this is the book for you. ,SCENIC DRIVING CALIFORNIA’S PACIFIC COAST details towns, pocket beaches, natural wonders, museums, historic attractions, and other amazing places on 1,100 miles of California’s wild Pacific coast from Santa Barbara to Oregon. I drove up and down the coast, mostly on Highway 1, four times when I first researched the book in 2013, exploring well-known attractions and discovering unknown off-the-beaten-highway curiosities.
Some of the places I love the best on the left coast are the rugged mountainsides at the Big Sur coast, pocket beaches near Santa Cruz, the skyscraping redwoods at Muir Woods and Redwood National Park, Fern Canyon in Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, and Alamere Falls, a rare tidefall or waterfall that flows directly into the ocean, at Point Reyes National Seashore.
,SCENIC DRIVING CALIFORNIA’S PACIFIC COAST, with 284 pages, is jammed with useful information, trip beta, and GPS coordinates to find places and illustrated with lots of my color photographs.
You can pick up my newest book--,SCENIC DRIVING CALIFORNIA’S PACIFIC COAST--of road dreams at your local bookstore or order directly from Amazon at the link below. See ya on the road and keep both hands on the steering wheel!
April 5, 2022
NEW RELEASE! Hiking Colorado's Hidden Gems
March 17, 2022
Satyabrata Dam: India's Greatest Mountaineer
I spent last weekend with my good friend Satyabrata Dam, an Indian mountaineer and world traveler, and one of the nicest and most humble people you could ever meet. Satya is renowned as perhaps India’s greatest mountaineer and adventurer. He’s climbed Mount Everest, the world’s highest peak, eight times, with four of those ascents on each of the mountain’s four faces and summitted many peaks in the Indian Himalayas, many of them unnamed and previously unclimbed. Last Saturday morning he told me, “Stewart, you need to come to the Himalayas. We can explore many valleys and mountains where no one has ever been, beautiful, beautiful places.”That sentiment is the way that Satya (his name means "truth") has lived his life. He said that when he was a child, he stood on a hill with his father and looked north at a horizon filled with high, white mountains. “I told my father I am going to climb all of them.” And he did. Besides standing atop Everest, Satya has climbed all of the other 8,000-meter peaks, some several times, except the five in Pakistan. “They won’t give me a visa because I am Indian.” In the next breath, Satya told me that the highest unclimbed mountain in the world sits astride the India-Pakistan border, with their armies on each side of the peak. “I have applied for a permit and asked them, Please stop shooting at each other for one month so I can climb the mountain.” Permit denied.Satya has been to every country in the world except North Korea and Pakistan. “I don’t want to go to North Korea. Someone is with you all the time and you cannot climb any mountains.” As for Pakistan, “They won’t give me a visa since I am Indian.” The man doesn’t just visit all of these countries. He also climbs the highest mountain in each one. At last count, he says, he has been to the high points of 174 countries, more than anyone else. He has climbed many of those high points, like Denali, Huascaran, and Kilimanjaro, several times.Besides these high adventures, Satya has traveled to both the North and South Poles; served as a submarine commander in the Indian Navy; walked across Africa from Tunisia to South Africa; followed the fabled Silk Road from Mongolia to Istanbul; skied across the Greenland icecap; climbed the second highest peaks of the five continents, one of only three people that have done that; been a TED Fellow, and is a member of the Royal Geographic Society. As if that wasn’t enough, Satya also was invited to study glaciology at a university in Iceland. “They told me that I had on-the-ground experience on all of the major glaciers in the world, so I knew first-hand about the effects of climate change.”Satyabrata is now exploring more of the United States for three months with his friend Belinda, a Swiss-American adventurer. He had been in Europe for the past few months and had to leave to renew his visa. “He called me,” said Belinda, “and said, Do you want to go on a road trip in America for three months? Ask your mother if we can borrow her car?” So she asked and now they are driving everywhere on a great American odyssey. “I am free,” Satya says. “I trust in Life each day to provide.” He has no home, no family, nothing to inhibit fully experiencing his life and passion for exploration and personal growth. “The mountains are my teacher.” Besides climbing, walking, and exploring, he also writes books and articles. One of his best books is ,Life on Top: Lessons from the High Mountains, a premier on living your best life and learning to let go. Some of the chapter titles are Learning to Fail, Learning to Live, Learning to Die, and Learning to Love. All topics that we discussed until midnight last night along with my personal mantra—we become what we dream.Last Sunday night, Satya promised to cook an epic Indian feast. “I am a very good Indian chef,” he said. “And I have everything with me.” Satya was right--it was an amazing dinner filled with taste, color, and variety as well as stimulating conversation about the Himalayas, Colorado's mountains and canyons, Indian philosophy, Hinduism, and, of course, climbing and mountaineering. And, of course, we ate Indian-style with our right hand, making sure to lick our fingers to show the cook how much we appreciated his efforts.,Here is a link to Satya's blog: c u on top,And a link to Satya's website Photograph below: Satya and I on top of South Gateway Rock at the Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs. 
