Trip to Huccacove Cave, near Colorado Springs
Cold, wet, hungry, filthy dirty, and very well satisfied with ourselves. Mike, Donald, and I are driving out the valley, from Manitou Springs.
“Where did the name come from, ‘Huccacove’?”
“You’d never in a million years guess.” Donald lets it hang in the air a moment. “We found a newspaper article from around the turn of the century. It said there were four people who went exploring in that cave. Their names were Hugh, Carl, Cora, and Bernice. They put the first parts of their names together to make “hucacobe”. It got corrupted somewhere, and now most folks spell it ‘huccacove'”.
He continues, “If we hadn’t found that article, nobody would ever have known where the name came from. But the real mystery is how it got spread around, and became popular. The cave had a perfectly good name, Mammoth Cave. Probably copied from the Mammoth Cave in the east, and a bit pretentious at that. It doesn’t quite measure up to the other one. But who those people were, and why the new name stuck, we’ll never know.”
Deep in the bowels of the earth. Lots to see and do!
Some rock formations, they call it “cave bacon”…
…others look more like eggs.
Our leader, Donald (center), is veteran of exploring Lechuguilla cave in New Mexico. Maybe you’ve seen him in National Geographic.
