Timpanogos Cave

Martin Hansen found the first cave chasing a mountain lion. In October 1887 the American Fork settler was cutting timber high on the canyon's south wall when he came on cougar tracks and followed them to a ledge, and the ledge had an opening in it. Hansen Cave was the first of the three — Timpanogos and Middle followed in 1915 and 1921 — and the caves turned out to hold some of the finest formations in the West: helictites that grow in spirals against gravity, anthodites in needle-clusters, and the Great Heart of Timpanogos, the massive flowstone formation that became the cave's signature.

The threat came before the protection. In the 1890s a Chicago onyx company sent crews into Hansen Cave and stripped the formations out — the stalactites and draperies sawed off and shipped east for the ornamental stone trade. When the second cave was found, the local groups that knew what had happened to Hansen pushed for federal protection fast enough to matter: Timpanogos Cave was declared a National Monument fourteen months after its rediscovery, in October 1922, to protect the caves from the fate the first one had already suffered.

The trail to the entrance is the approach — a mile and a half of switchbacks climbing eleven hundred feet of canyon wall to the cave mouth, the only way in. The cave system is inside Mount Timpanogos itself, the eleven-thousand-seven-hundred-foot peak that gives the whole canyon its name — a Ute word the mountain carried before the caves were found.

Timpanogos is the archive's rescue file — the caves that were discovered, half-destroyed by a mining company, and saved by the speed of the response, the formations that remain protected under the mountain the local clubs refused to lose a second time.