A fully contained and self-sufficient town functioning secretly and quietly — buried deep beneath a snow-covered mountain. The location for a spy movie?
In reality, this town inside a mountain is the setting for a top-secret military facility in Colorado.
Cheyenne Mountain is a triple-peaked mountain in El Paso County, Colorado Springs. The linked caves a mile inside are home to some of the world’s most sophisticated satellite systems and other tracking equipment. This hollow mountain even has an underground lake deep inside.
This nuclear Cold War-era bunker was abandoned in 2006
This command and control center was built during the height of the Cold War in 1965, and was designed to resist a Soviet nuclear attack. As the threat from Russia seemed to subside, the bunker was abandoned.
Pentagon refurbishes the Cheyenne Mountain Complex
In the wake of fresh threats from countries like Iran and North Korea, the U.S. has knocked the dust off the decades-old bunker once meant to protect top officials in the case of a nightmarish nuclear event. The U.S. airspace defense military has moved its communications equipment back to this Cold War-era bunker. The bunker is home to more than a dozen government and Department of Defense agencies now.
Here are some amazing facts about this Cold War-era bunker:
- There are 15 buildings one mile inside the complex that are 2,000 ft. down from the top of the mountain. Workers take buses to reach their offices.
- Each building is buffered by a 25-ton blast door.
- To protect the building from seismic movement, the buildings sit on 1,300 giant springs and are built 18 in. away from the rock walls to move independently if there is an earthquake or a blast.
- The military facility has a workout space, spin gym, hospital, chapel, convenience store, and more.
