It's an Exciting World

Nick took Steph, Matt, and I to Lava Beds National Monument, which was a 45 minute drive from his mother’s house.  We started out at the visitor center and got the passes to the 2pm labyrinth cave tour.  Afterwards we went to Skull cave.  It was a massive cave named after the remains of some humans and animals found there.  The cave was very cold despite the day being quite warm.  When we got to the bottom there was a small patch of ice that was barred off from letting people on it.  The ice was pretty dirty, but it was frozen solid from what I could tell.

After that we went down the trail to the painted cave and symbol bridge.  The lava tube that ends at Skull cave made a whole series of lava tubes and lava valleys, depending on where the ceiling had caved in.  These were spread out along the path to painted cave and we stopped at nearly every one.  

The painted cave had a good bit of deposition on the walls, but we couldn’t tell if there were any actual petroglyphs.  At the back of the cave was a small hole that we went down to see a tiny ice lake.  The hole was just big enough for us to squeeze down and about one story deep.  The ice at the bottom was gorgeous.

The symbol bridge had some decent petroglyphs and it was nice.

After the painted cave we had lunch of some tasty sandwiches we had picked up in town on our way to the caves.

We then decided to go to Valentine cave, as it was pretty easy and supposed to be a different kind of formation.  When we got there it was very smooth, very round, and there wasn’t much rubble.  This is also where we got our first glimpse of cave slime.  The slime was interesting in that it looked silver and gold.  The slime is a lot of bacteria colonies that are hydrophobic.  Being hydrophobic they make the water they get into tiny droplets that are suspended on their surface.  The droplets make the cave walls shine.  Any bacteria that brown or yellow will glow gold and any grey bacteria will glow silver from the lights mixing with the water droplets.  For the good pictures of this skip down to the section about Golden Dome cave that was named for these hydrophobic bacteria and their effects.  

Valentine cave was also fun due to the number of routes that could be taken, all leading to the same place.  There were points where a large tunnel would break off to the left and a small one to the right, with a tiny tunnel right down the middle.  I had to go through all of them of course.  While coming up the tiniest of them I started imitating golem.

Valentine cave was well developed and had a good bit of smoothing of the already smooth floor.  Below are Steph, Matt, and Nick standing at the entrance to Valentine Cave.

When we got back to the Visitor Center there was still a little time before the tour so we took that time to go through Mushpot Cave, which was set up as an introduction to the caves in general.  It was ok, but not very exciting, as it was the only cave to be electrically lit.  Then we had a short nap in the visitor center.
We started out the Labyrinth tour with Jesse the ranger and Niko the intern.  Jesse was leading with Niko following.  We started out by going into the Labyrinth down a ladder and squeezing through a small area to a lava waterfall.  off the waterfall were a couple small passages that merged with other caves.  We also some some roots making their way through the ceiling.  In the roots was a cave millipede, but I wasn’t able to get a picture of it.

Jesse also talked about how the things that were in the cave had built up over thousands of years.  Anything that wasn’t black had been brought in from outside.  So the bacteria and deposition came from water vapor that had seeped in.  Below you can see a wall where the lava hardened in a melting shape with white deposition of calcium carbonate on it.

We got to see some deposition in the form of corals.  These were said to cover the caves from top to bottom before people came, but they were so fragile that the people had broken nearly all of them in the developed caves.

We went through a few more caves and down a little lava slide.

After the tour the guide, Jesse, told us we should finish up the cave that we had started and that Niko should do it as well.  We went through the cave and found a small brown bat.  It was alone and tiny, but really cool to see.  All the caves that had large numbers of bats had been closed down so that the bats could raise their young in peace.  We made it back to the labyrinth entrance and decided to continue through the cave loop.

We started out with Golden Dome, which very much lived up to it’s name.  Getting into the cave was pretty easy and the actual dome part had 12 foot tall ceilings in most places. It wasn’t easy to capture the gold on the phone’s camera, but here is the best I got.

And also the best silver shot I could get.

Golden dome was much like Valentine cave in that it was easy to get in and out, with multiple paths that all came together along the way.

After that we made a short stop by Hopkin’s Chocolate cave, named for the formations on the wall that look like melted chocolate.  These formations come about when the lava that had previously melted is reheated by another flow, but not remelted.  It is more or less firing them like ceramics in a kiln.

After the chocolate cave we walked around the Garden Bridges, which was a collection of small bridges.

It was getting pretty late in the day so we decided to stop by the last cave of the day, and the one we wanted to see most.  This was the major ice cave, Meryl cave.  Niko had given us the hint that if we wanted to make it to where the ice still stood we should go to the back of the cave and ignore the railing and platform.  We did that it was amazing.  The ice formations were stunning and I got some decent pictures, that don’t do the formations justice.

We even found what I think was a young cave centipede crawling on one of the ice structures.

While we were at the back of the cave two other groups came down.  We didn’t want anyone else back there with use, especially since we didn’t trust them to be as careful as we were being, and not touching the ice.  When they reached the platform we turned our lights off and waited for them to go away.  It was an exhilarating experience.

The whole experience felt like real life minecraft and I’d love to go back again.  
The ice was our diamonds, the chocolate melt was our coal, and the gold and silver were our gold and iron.  There are few places I’ve been that have lived up to my expectations and then some as much as this place did.  I was more than pleasantly surprised by how varied and magnificent all the formations were.

After going through the caves we stopped by Captain Jack’s Stronghold, which is where the Native Americans held off the US Cavalry for several months.  The only reason the Natives gave up was that the Cavalry captured their water supply.  It was a maze of rocks and caves.  On our way back to the car we saw an adorable cotton tail rabbit.

We then stopped by a cliff face that had lots of petroglyphs on it.  It used to be a cliff that was up against the water, but the water level had been lowered in the valley to make way for more farmland.  The cliff was off limits, as a few days prior to us getting there the petroglyphs had been vandalized pretty badly.  We could still see many of them, but we could also make out pretty plainly lots of modern graffiti all over the cliff as well.