Gold Camp Road Tunnels

The story

Before this shelf of dirt was a local legend, it was the "gold-plated railroad." Completed in 1901 as the Colorado Springs & Cripple Creek District Railway, the Short Line blasted nine raw granite tunnels through the mountains to haul gold ore from Cripple Creek down to processing mills. Teddy Roosevelt took the scenic train ride and declared it "bankrupts the English language," but by 1920 the gold boom fizzled and train service stopped. A local businessman named W.D. Corley bought the trackbed, pulled up the rails, and reopened it in 1924 as a private toll road for automobiles, before transferring it to the public highway system in 1939.

The real turn toward the weird came in 1988 when Tunnel 3 suffered a structural collapse under the weight of rotting timber support beams. The Forest Service permanently gated the middle 8.5-mile stretch to vehicle traffic, leaving a dark, dead-end mountain shelf above North Cheyenne Cañon. Almost immediately, local lore filled the void. A rumor spread that a school bus full of children had been crushed inside Tunnel 3, trapping their unquiet spirits to giggle, tug at hikers' clothes, and push stalled cars to safety. Public records show no such bus crash ever happened—timber decay did the work—but facts have never stopped a good Colorado Springs midnight ritual.

What lingers in Tunnel 2 is the famous neutral-gear experiment. Legend says if you park inside the pitch-black tunnel at night, kill your engine, and drop the transmission into neutral, phantom hands will push your car through to the other side, leaving tiny handprints smeared on your tailgate. You didn't hear it from us, but mountain road dust simply clings to body oils already on your paint—though when you're sitting in the cold mountain shadow with the wind howling through raw-hewn granite, that explanation feels thin.