Deep Cut Guide

The Hunting Cabin

1 boulder problem · Biotite gneiss · 11,291 ft

Help locate these routes: survey the wall

How well located

Crag only 1 

No route here has its own point yet. The map pin is the crag. At the wall? Survey it: 30 seconds per route.

Rock, from the geologic map

Biotite gneiss. Paleoproterozoic, about 2,500 to 1,600 million years old.

Gray, medium-grained, equigranular, well-foliated gneiss typically containing approximately 25–50 percent quartz, 20–30 percent plagioclase (approximately An30), 0–30 percent microcline, 10–15 percent biotite, 0–15 percent muscovite, 0–10 percent sillimanite, 0–5 percent hornblende, 1–2 percent opaque minerals, and a trace zircon. Most outcrops contain 5–20 percent granitic layers (leucosomes). Sillimanite, where abundant, occurs in fibrous, elongate, light-colored aggregates or clots as wide as about 1 cm. Migmatitic biotite gneiss in Clear Creek gave preliminary U-Pb zircon date on nonmelt phase of 1,773±18 Ma; near Pine, just south of map area, similar rock gave U-Pb zircon date of 1,780±9 Ma (W.R. Premo, unpub. data, 2005)

This is the map unit under this crag's map point, read from the 1:100,000 sheet (Kellogg and others, 2008, USGS Geologic Investigations Series 3000). The point can be a few hundred metres from the rock, a cliff often stands on the line between two units, and at that scale a line on the map is about 100 m wide on the ground, so the wall itself may be the neighbouring unit. Every crag on this unit: Biotite gneiss. Geology data: Macrostrat (CC BY 4.0), serving USGS and Colorado Geological Survey maps.

On the map since 1905

The USGS has mapped this ground since 1905. 29 historical sheets cover this crag's map point; the oldest is below.

Thumbnail of the 1905 USGS sheet covering The Hunting Cabin
USGS 1:62500-scale Quadrangle for Central City, CO 1905 · U.S. Geological Survey · 1905 · 1:62,500 sheet
USGS Historical Topographic Map Collection · Public domain · the record · placed by its coordinates
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Hidden as soon as you tell us, everywhere it appears, before anyone reviews it.

Public domain, U.S. Geological Survey. The sheet shows the ground as the survey found it then, which is why a trail or road you know may be missing. Every sheet over this point, 1905 to 1983: USGS topoView.

From the archives

Photographs of this area held by the Library of Congress, oldest first. Every one carries the Library's own "no known restrictions on publication"; anything else is left out.

Idaho Springs · Marchington, C. (Clarence) · 1903 · photomechanical print
Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division · Public domain · the record · indexed to this place by the archive
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Hidden as soon as you tell us, everywhere it appears, before anyone reviews it.

Men at work inside a mine. Idaho Springs, Co. · Noyes, S. A. · 1910
Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division · Public domain · the record · indexed to this place by the archive
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Hidden as soon as you tell us, everywhere it appears, before anyone reviews it.

[Ford auto on mountain road near Idaho Springs, Col.] · 1910
Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division · Public domain · the record · indexed to this place by the archive
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Hidden as soon as you tell us, everywhere it appears, before anyone reviews it.

Abandoned gold mill. Idaho Springs, Colorado · Lee, Russell, 1903-1986 · 1941
Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division · Public domain · the record · indexed to this place by the archive
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Hidden as soon as you tell us, everywhere it appears, before anyone reviews it.

Abandoned gold mill. Idaho Springs, Colorado · Lee, Russell, 1903-1986 · 1941
Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division · Public domain · the record · indexed to this place by the archive
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Hidden as soon as you tell us, everywhere it appears, before anyone reviews it.

Abandoned gold mill. Idaho Springs, Colorado · Lee, Russell, 1903-1986 · 1941
Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division · Public domain · the record · indexed to this place by the archive
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Hidden as soon as you tell us, everywhere it appears, before anyone reviews it.

Pile of tailing from gold mill, defunct. Idaho Springs, Colorado · Lee, Russell, 1903-1986 · 1941
Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division · Public domain · the record · indexed to this place by the archive
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Hidden as soon as you tell us, everywhere it appears, before anyone reviews it.

Remains of gold mill. Idaho Springs, Colorado · Lee, Russell, 1903-1986 · 1941
Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division · Public domain · the record · indexed to this place by the archive
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Hidden as soon as you tell us, everywhere it appears, before anyone reviews it.

Rocky Mountains near Idaho Springs, Colorado · Wolcott, Marion Post, 1910-1990 · 1941
Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division · Public domain · the record · found by place name, not yet checked
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Hidden as soon as you tell us, everywhere it appears, before anyone reviews it.

Road into Idaho Springs, Colorado · Vachon, John, 1914-1975 · 1942
Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division · Public domain · the record · indexed to this place by the archive
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Hidden as soon as you tell us, everywhere it appears, before anyone reviews it.

1 more at the Library of Congress.

Photographs near this crag

Taken within 1.5 km of this crag's map point and published under a licence that lets us show them, from Wikimedia Commons. The coordinates say where the camera was, not what it was pointed at, so some of these will be the creek or the trail rather than the rock.

Backpacking across Europe (Unsplash) · Lionello DelPiccolo liodp · 2016 · 1,491 m from the crag's map point
Wikimedia Commons · CC0 · the record · placed by its coordinates
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Routes

Also within 3 km

Straight line between the two crags' map points, each of which can be some way from its rock. For when this wall is full, or the sun has found it.

Photos from climbers

No photos here yet. If you're at the crag, yours would be the first.

Pick a photo from your camera roll rather than taking one here: a picture taken inside a browser usually has no location saved in it, and we check that the photo was taken at this crag before publishing it. Photos of guidebook pages and topos are refused — they're the author's work. By sending one you're letting us publish it.

Nobody reviews these before they appear, so anyone can report one and it's hidden straight away — including you, if you change your mind, and including a photographer who finds their own picture here.

Taken at the crag by climbers and published as they sent them. Each one's own location had to be within 0.5 km of this crag before we accepted it. See something that shouldn't be here? Use Report this photo under it and it's hidden at once. Anything else, write to us.

Sun today
In shade all day
Wall faces NW (USGS elevation). Shade from the surrounding terrain is counted.
Deep terrain: the skyline averages 22° above horizontal, so the sun has to climb well clear of the rim before it reaches this wall.
Rain & forecast
No recent weather for this crag.

Conditions reported

Nothing reported recently.

Report what you see

Reports are dated and fade on their own: wet rock after 3 days, a bad bolt after a year. No names, no text.

Access & safety

Emergency: call 911. Read out your location: Works without signal. If GPS fails, this crag's approximate map point is 39.85071 N, 105.70118 W (The Hunting Cabin). That point can be off by hundreds of metres, so say so.

The map point for this crag is on land managed by Arapaho National Forest (federal). It lies inside national conservation area, national forest.

Land manager from USGS PAD-US (public domain), read 2026-09-29. It is the manager of the crag's map point, which can be a long way from the wall. What you may do on the rock is the manager's to say, not ours.

Rules for all Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests land

Fees
No entrance fee for the forest. Some locations require a reservation, pass, permit or day-use fee.
Overnight
Camping more than 14 days in a 30-day period, or more than 30 days in a 365-day period, is prohibited across the forests and the Pawnee National Grassland. Dispersed camping is within 300 feet of most Forest Service roads, on National Forest land; the MVUM shows which.

Read on Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests's own pages, checked 2026-09-29 by John Crawford. What they require, in full, or their own climbing page. These apply to the manager's whole holding; anything specific to this crag is above.

Nearby, from OpenStreetMap

Campsite
Unnamed, 4,343 m away (map)

Distances are a straight line from this crag's map point, which can itself be hundreds of metres off; a road may be much longer. Mapped by OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL), so a toilet missing here may simply be unmapped. Parking here is what OSM has drawn nearby, not a guidebook's directions.

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