- Glenwood Cavern Adventure Park is actually located on top of Iron Mountain and above Glenwood Springs.

Right now I'm riding the Mine Wheel, and you can tell how amazing this theme park is by the incredible views that sit behind me.

I caught up with owner Steve Beckley about this theme park and those historic Fairy Caves.

- So we're basically in one of the main arteries of the park, you know, as we're walking through the old-time photo and the trading post.

- [Elizabeth] Steve, tell me about the history of the historic Fairy Caves.

- Wow, there's such a long history of this place.

It was discovered years ago in the late 1800s by Charles Darrow, and he was up here exploring the land.

He had done a mining claim, and they found a small opening and crawled through and found this magnificent cave.

And a few years later, after some development, in 1897, he opened this cave up to the public.

And it was unique because it was on top of a mountain.

Glenwood was just up and coming with the new hot springs, and the train was bringing tourists in.

And he had a built-in tour guide staff of his 16 kids, so they would bring people up in burros and wagons up from the Hotel Colorado up to the cave and give 'em tours of the cave.

But one of the unique things that happened was, this was one of the first caves in the whole world to be electrically lit.

Westinghouse brought one of his hydroplants in and created electricity, they ran wires up to the property and actually lit the cave electricity.

So where most people in the United States didn't have power or electricity in their houses, they would come and see this cave tour that was electrically lit with these Edison bulbs.

In 1960, a couple Colorado cavers came to the cave and was just exploring, and that time, it was only about, oh, about 1,000 foot of passageway that was known.

And they pushed through a small hole in the back and found these magnificent huge rooms, about another mile of cave, and decided, wow, we should do something with this.

So they bought the land from the Darrow family and was gonna commercialize it, and they just never got around to it.

And I was in college, and it's (mumbles) mines in 1980, and 1982, I started calling him and saying I'd like to get involved, I'd like to get involved, and I would call him and write letter to him once a year to try to get him to sell me the property.

16 years later, 1998, he finally decided to sell us the property.

We put a new tunnel in and lit the cave and opened up the new passageways and opened it up to the public, and after 82 years of being closed, we reopened the cave in 1999 and started giving cave tours of this historic cave.

1998, when we came up here, first of all, the cave was about a mile long that we knew of.

Currently we're at about 3 1/2 miles.

So we've discovered another 2 1/2 miles of new passageway that has lakes and big formations and 120-foot tall ceilings.

Just an amazing, an amazing cave system.

One of the premier cave systems in the United States.

This cave is formed differently than most caves.

Most caves are formed from groundwater coming from the surface, this cave was formed from hydrothermal water coming deep from the earth.

And it's basically the same water that's in the hot springs down below right now.

So this hot water will come up into the limestone and eat away the weak limestone and leave these big massive caves, but it also brought in wonderful coloring because of the mineralization, which differs us from other caves because most of the caves don't have this high mineral content.

We just started envisioning that we had this beautiful property with these great views, but we brought people up and they couldn't stay, they just had to go in the cave and then we took 'em back down, so that's why in 2003, we elected to put this mile-long tram system that would bring people from the base down in Glenwood up to the top of Iron Mountain.

So then we realized that people were coming up, and we had a lot of people coming.

And the wait to get in the cave tour was three hours long.

So like, well, if they're here waiting, we might as well put some rides in or something.

So that's when we started actually adding rides.

(upbeat piano music) When we were designing the park, we don't have a lot of flat land, so we have to design things that fit our topography, so the Alpine Coaster, there's almost a mile of track.

It winds you down through the trees.

The Giant Canyon Swing, we actually take a swing, a normal swing that's on hydraulics, and we swing you out over a 1,300 foot cliff, and you can be looking down 1,300 feet.

It's an amazingly scary ride.

People love it, it's one of our most popular rides.

We always are looking for the next big ride that we can put it, and this we're designing, well, we haven't named it yet, but it's kind of probably something like the Haunted Mine ride.

And we're actually blasting a 100, 150 foot shaft into the solid limestone rock, and we're gonna be putting a drop right in there where you'll go into a building, and you'll sit in a seat, and we'll do a show, and while you're focusing on the show, we'll take the floor away, and then we'll drop you down this shaft into darkness, 150 feet.

- This is also a year-round resort.

- That's correct, so about eight months out of the year, we keep most of the rides open.

But in the wintertime, we are on top of a mountain, it's 7,100 feet, so we do get some snow.

So we limit the rides that we open in the winter.

But we're open on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.

We've put half a million lights up here, so it's all lit up and colorful and festive.

And we keep a few rides open, which one of 'em is our Alpine Coaster, so you can imagine, it's like a big luge, you're winding down to these big snowbanks.

It's kind of like you're on your own luge going down a mile of track.

We keep open the laser tag and the 4D theater, and the restaurant's open.

And we have fire and s'mores and different stuff for the family to do.

So it's a great place to come up and see the lights of the city, see the stars, have a wonderful meal, and ride some rides.

First of all, I have to say that I feel very lucky and very fortunate that Pete Prebble, the original owner, actually sold me the property.

And I'm very fortunate that people appreciate what we've built and are coming here.

We take 100% of the profit and we put it back into the properties, so that's why we're always building new rides or making it better.

Because it's not really about making money.

It's about making this incredible experience for families up here.

That's what really drives me.

I'm really proud of what we've done.

We've made a place in this world where there's so many electronics and video games and things to do, that it just take the mind off of each other, we've built a place that people can come and reconnect with their family and spend some quality time together building memories, and that's