Driving south out of Colorado Springs, you’ll see a mountain that doesn’t look any different from the rest. But it hides one of the most secure facilities ever built in the U.S. Deep inside Cheyenne Mountain are a set of tunnels & steel rooms that once kept watch for missile attacks during the Cold War. Why were they built, and are they still in use today? Let’s find out.
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Key takeaways
Here’s what you’ll learn:
- When crews started carving out the mountain & how long it took
- What the rooms look like inside & how they’re built
- How heavy the blast doors are
- Who actually uses the place today
Where the bunker sits
Cheyenne Mountain Space Force Station is just outside Colorado Springs, Colorado. It looks like any other mountain in the Front Range. Yet it has a long tunnel inside that leads to an entire mini-city underground.
It’s part of NORAD & U.S. Northern Command territory, though it’s technically its own base. As a result, security’s tight. The site isn’t open to the public & there aren’t any official tours. Sure, you can drive by the entrance. But that’s as close as anyone without clearance gets. The rest stays hidden behind the rock.
When it was built and first switched on
In 1961, the U.S. started digging into Cheyenne Mountain, right in the middle of the Cold War’s peak paranoia. The site was ready for full-time use by 1966 & it was packed with equipment designed to detect incoming missiles.
However, the official date that construction was completed was in early 1967. It took years of blasting through granite before the lights even came on. They pulled out roughly 693,000 tons of rock just to make space for the whole thing. Inside, the carved-out area is about five acres, which is roughly the size of four football fields.
What’s actually inside the mountain
Rather than one giant bunker, there are 15 separate buildings tucked inside. They’re all self-contained, with their own offices & command centers. They also have their own maintenance shops, even places to eat.
Each building stands free of the surrounding rock & rests on more than 1,300 steel springs. There’s an 18-inch gap between the walls & the mountain rock. As a result, anytime something shakes, whether due to an explosion or an earthquake, the buildings gently move instead of cracking apart.
The top of the mountain itself rises over 9,500 feet, but you’d never know what’s sitting beneath it. The main chambers are buried around 2,000 feet inside the mountain. That’s deep enough that you can’t hear even the loudest storm outside when you’re inside.
Workers drive through a mile-long tunnel just to get to the main entrance. It’s about as isolated as a workplace can get.
The blast doors and “button-up” drills
To get inside, you go through a tunnel and face enormous steel blast doors. These are about 3½ feet thick & weigh roughly 25 tons each. They can be closed hydraulically in under a minute, or manually when needed, and during “button-up” drills, the staff practices doing this. They have to be able to seal the complex completely.
Power, air, and water inside the rock
The complex can function on its own, should it need to. Normally, it’s hooked up to the local power grid, but there are diesel generators ready to start working at a moment’s notice. Since those systems need cooling, there’s an entire system using stored water tanks. The same water handles drinking & washing, as well as cleaning the tunnel walls.
There are concrete pits called sumps at the bottom that catch any storm runoff or condensation that drips down the pipes. The plumbing’s designed so that if those pits fill up, overflow lines send the water outside the mountain. That backup system is almost never needed. But maintenance crews still check it, though, because it’s easier to test it than to deal with a flood in an underground tunnel later on.
The place was effectively built to stay livable, even if the outside world wasn’t.
Ventilation & exhaust stacks
There are also two huge metal chimneys poking out of the granite, each about 12 feet across. These are the north & south exhaust stacks. They’re part of the ventilation system that keeps the underground air fresh.
Only one runs at a time, while the other sits idle until it’s needed. Inside, the stacks collect air and push it all upward before it escapes at the top.
Who runs the place today
Today, Cheyenne Mountain is no longer the main command post it once was. Most of the daily operations moved to the nearby Peterson Space Force Base. The mountain complex went into backup status. Even so, it still houses communication & defense systems.
Space Base Delta 1 manages the site & it serves as an alternate command center for NORAD & U.S. Northern Command. Only 30% of the space is in use now, and just a handful of staff work there daily. But it’s kept ready to go 24/7. Just in case.
Sources: Please see here for a complete listing of all sources that were consulted in the preparation of this article.
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