In Colorado Springs and Black Forest, the ground can lift a foundation

Some parts of buying a home around Colorado Springs have nothing to do with the house itself. They are about the ground beneath it.

Many spots in El Paso County, the Colorado Springs and Black Forest areas among them, sit on expansive soils and rock. These hold clay minerals like bentonite and montmorillonite, which drink up water and swell. Wet that clay and it can expand a great deal and push with very large force. Under a home, that force cracks basement floors, lifts slabs, and damages foundations. When the ground dries out again it shrinks back, so the movement is not a one-time settling event but a slow seasonal breathing in and out.

There is a local twist on top of that. Beneath the City of Colorado Springs run areas of steeply dipping bedrock, mapped layers that can heave unevenly. That uneven, or differential, lift is nearly impossible to read from the curb, which is exactly why it pays to know about it before you buy rather than after a crack appears.

None of this is a reason to steer clear of the area. It is simply normal Front Range homework. The standard way to handle it is not a guessing game about future repair bills. It is a soils, or geotechnical, report from a qualified engineer, paired with a foundation designed to match what the ground actually does. This is not a hazard to eyeball yourself; judging it is work for a competent soil engineer and engineering geologist. To see how these soils behave and where the heave zones are mapped, the Colorado Geological Survey’s swelling-soil report and its Colorado Springs heave map are the places to look.