I had a fantastic ride this morning to the Milk Pail. I got a ton of fresh veggies and fruits and they were super cheap. I was expecting to pay $40 for the broccoli, peppers, carrots, cabbage, cucumbers, blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, and Stilton, but it came to about $20. I think I’ll have to shop there more often. After the ride I got back and made my juice, which was tasty and filling. I really look forward to being able to do this every week.
We had dinner at the Creamery and Brewpub in Klymath Falls, OR. All the beer there was delicious and the food was satisfactory. After a long day of caving anything would have tasted fantastic. Nick got the beer tasting and shared it around since he was driving.
After dinner we went to a Minimart where Nick’s Dad works. He seems like a man that could never retire. From the sound of it he has plenty of money just not enough to keep him busy. He seems like an incredibly active man, and I hope to be as active as that when I am his age.
We spent the night at Nick’s mom’s house and drove up to his Dad’s place the next morning. We stopped by the grocery to get some eggs and berries. When we got there Nick’s dad made us some pancakes and eggs.
As it was father’s day I called to say hi, and ended up waking them up since they were still in Hawaii. I was surprised to have woken them since it was already 6:30 where they were.
We got on the road shortly after breakfast, only stopping once around lunchtime. We took a walk around the sundial bridge, which was pretty accurate as we were only 6 days off from when it is calibrated for.
We then stopped for lunch at a place called Grilla Bites, which was really healthy food. They also had a Ruth Goldberg Machine that we had to play with. It had 2 big panels, but also went across the ceiling.
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.
After my last day at Zynga I came home and packed to head up to Northeast California. I took a pad of paper and lots of colored pens for ideation along the way. I got a lot of stuff written down, most of it will be useful I think. It will certainly help when deciding where to go with Robert on Monday.
I had already met Nick’s Mom, but I also got to meet the dog Skipper.
He is a great dog and loves chasing a tennis ball that you hit as far as you like with a tennis racket. We stayed over the night and crashed hard since we didn’t get the until 2am. It was really nice for Nick to drive that far after having driven to get the Beer Revival and BBQ Cookoff tickets already that day. Steph and I slept on an air mattress and I must say that 2 people on an air mattress isn’t a great idea. Nick’s Mom made focaccia bread, which was delicious.
Said goodbyes. Need to set up a blog to keep everyone up to date.
I always love listening to the history of ancient Rome. It was a great book on the subject of Augustus, with some good details before and after his life. I think that if I ever really want to know the history of Rome I’ll need to sit down with a mapped version of the events. All the places and islands and people get really confusing for me. I’ll need a visual basis for it to really sink in.
Last night for board games night I showed up early and Riley let me in. I got some of the Gyros Gyros falafel wrap for dinner, and it was delicious. Riley decided to make some pizza, which was also really tasty. I grabbed an angry orchard cider with elderflower, and it was really really good.
Chris showed up a little early and we played a game of Neuroshima Hex. I was Blue and he was Green. It was the first time I had played the game and I really like it. Chris got an early lead, but once I got the hang of it I was able to get good traction and take him down. The game went really well for me in both luck and figuring out the mechanics quickly. BGG Link
Nima and Caryn then showed up and we played a round of Shadows Over Camelot. The game was going really well, and then I decided to show that I was the traitor when we were all gathered around the Picks and I was supposed to put down the 5. Nobody else had a 5, but they were all there. They managed to get out of there, and even managed to finish the Picks since it didn’t come up for a while. I was able to really hit them hard in a number of situations and the game ended when they lost the holy grail. They weren’t doing very well in any other area either. It would have been a close game even without me turning traitor. BGG Link
Nima and Caryn left, and then 10 of us decided to get together to play a few rounds of Avalon. It is just like the card game mafia, but with some expanded rules. I think it makes the game actually fun since you can somewhat piece together who is who. Chris was the Merlin character and he knew that he was going to be assassinated no matter what, which was right. I think the game is fun and would love to play it again. I was loyal both times, won the first, lost the second. BGG Link
I liked this walk through the periodic table, and it works well with the book Quantum. I liked some of the smaller facts that they go into about the elements and how they were discovered. I wouldn’t recommend this book to many people, but it is better than Quantum for all of those who aren’t looking for something specifically about physics.
Brian had Hanabi with him, as he tends to always have. We played a 5 person game and got pretty far. There were a few mistakes and we are also working on convention of what to do/understand. With some of these conventions the game will get much easier, and it will be fun to finally get the whole thing without making any mistakes.
It's an Exciting World 