The main room is roughly 75 feet long and five feet tall. The ceiling of Sulphur Cave is covered by delicate crystals and snottites-tiny stalactites that look like they're dripping mucous, but are in fact colonies of bacteria dripping sulfuric acid, which they excrete as they digest hydrogen sulfide in the spring water. One big reason is that it's home to a creature that has drawn the interest of scientists around the globe: a small, blood-red worm that lives in the toxic waters in wriggling wormy blobs. One of only a handful of sulfur caves in the world, it was designated a National Natural Landmark by the National Parks Service in 2021. A stream bubbles up from a spring nearby, reeking of sulfur, and slopes into the hole, adding a persistent waft of rotten eggs to the air.īut underground, the cave is unique. It's a hole in the ground at the side of a ski run on Howelson Hill in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, surrounded by a wooden fence. Sulphur Cave doesn't look particularly dangerous from the surface. 'If you take the precautions we are and have the gear and the gloves, then you will be safe. 'Sulphur Cave is a really dangerous place,' says David Steinmann, a veteran caver and research associate with the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, gathering all the explorers at the mouth of the cave. The three science students from Georgia Tech arrive in brand-new Dickies coveralls, ready to enter the bowels of the Earth.

with a vial containing toxic spring water and the worms who live in it.

Darshan Chudasama, a graduate student in the Bhamla Lab at Georgia Tech, emerges from Sulphur Cave in Steamboat Springs, Colo.

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