Oregon Caves and Lava Beds National Monuments

We arrived at Cave Junction, Oregon mid-afternoon and stopped by the Oregon Caves National Monument visitor center to see about getting tickets to the cave tour. The lady explained that they only sell tickets for tours the day of, and that the line usually starts forming at 8AM. Got it.

We told the lady we’d see her in the morning -- and headed up to the campground. We were surprised to see the campground was entirely empty, save one other car. It was beautifully sited – the campsites were grouped along a creek that sat at the bottom of a narrow valley. They were well spaced, with creek access from most sites. We selected a site near the bathrooms, which were composting! This was the first time we came across this type. The roof of the outhouse was clear corrugated plastic, which provided beautiful natural light and intense solar heat gain...

Only one other group showed up that evening.

We checked out the creek and encountered a yellow-spotted millipede (these guys produce hydrogen cyanide for self-defense) and noped right out of there. Nightmare fuel: I learned just googling these guys that they gather in the thousands to millions in one spot to mate... 🙁

The next morning we drove back down to Cave Junction and secured third in line for the tours. Luckily, we secured the last two spots for the first tour of the day at 10AM. Because of covid, tours were limited to two households or six people.

We headed back up to the cave entrance and waited for our tour to start. The rest of our group were three ladies from Fresno who were fitting in an action packed five day road trip. There were a few historic buildings (1920s) right near the cave that were being remodeled -- they had beautiful siding made of tree bark.

The trails, access sidewalks and roads were beautiful masonry work. It's amazing how much the CCC did during the great Depression across all of the NPS sites we've visited.

Standing at the entrance of the cave you could feel the temperature gradient pretty sharply. It was maybe 80 degrees outside and 44 inside. It was chilly!

The caves were incredible. This is the only cave in the NPS that has all three types of rock – igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary. It has 8 endemic species, with 6 more unconfirmed. The only cave with more endemic species, Mammoth Caves in Kentucky, is dramatically larger. Oregon Caves is about 15,000' of explored passageways (they think they've found most of them) while Mammoth Caves has over 400 miles. These caves contained marble too -- There's only three caves containing marble in the NPS. We had been in one in Kings Canyon, Boyden Cave -- but that is managed by the USFS and isn't one of the three.

We learned about moonmilk, a liquid which a certain type of sulfur based bacteria creates. It's calcium carbonate, the active ingredient in tums! That's the ropy fuzzy stuff in the picture below. When it forms it creates all sorts of interesting shapes.

The tour lasted about an hour and 45 minutes and passed through many different rooms while we learned about the geology and biology of the animals that live there. Bats call this cave home (we saw one!), as well as a wood packrat who had made his home inside too, not far from an entrance. Besides that... nothing else can survive except for the troglobites that have evolved to survive in darkness and with little food.

I always thought it was an art form to light the interior of caves. This vantage point was from a balcony after passing through a long passageway and entering this larger space.

Lots of really neat formations in this cave – including a trove of draperies at the top of a steep ladder, called Paradise Lost. There was some bacon, but it looked really fatty.

Paleontologists have found short faced bear bones inside... except they have no idea how they got there, as all of the discovered entrances are too small to fit the giant 15' bear! They've found ice-age jaguar bones too, which are now extinct.

One last very cool thing -- calcium carbonate fluoresces under UV light -- a particularly pure formation of it cast a ghostly specter in the darkness.

Our muscles were starting to get cold after all that time and we were grateful to leave the caves and be back in the loving embrace of our sun.

We hit the road and headed back into California to our next stop – Lava Beds National Monument, which also had a first come first serve campground, Indian Wells, which was maybe 50% full when we got there. We picked a pretty good site with shade, which served us well when the temps climbed to the 90s. That evening we were treated to a phenomenal sunset.

The next morning we drove down south a bit to see mammoth crater and hidden valley, both volcanic features, passing by giant lava fields that looked like freshly tilled earth. After, we stopped by the visitor center to get our caving permit, where we also borrowed flashlights and got our passport stamp.

The ranger made several recommendations for the caves. There were maybe 15 described in the visitor guide. They are categorized by difficulty – easy, moderate, challenging which correlates to ambulatory requirements -- walking, stooping, or crawling. Crawling was a hard pass from both of us, so we kept away from the challenging ones.

We stopped by Mushpot Cave first, as the ranger suggested to get acquainted with the caves (there were interpretative exhibits inside). It was pretty cool – it described how these caves were formed, all being lava tubes. This one was lit but it will still dark enough that we needed flashlights.

The first 'real' cave we entered was Golden Dome, a moderate difficulty cave. This was probably the hardest one we did. It was pretty deep too (2,229').

We had to stoop and duck walk for quite a ways… towards the back, the ceiling got lower and lower until we were practically on all fours – and then it opened up into the golden dome, a larger area where you could stand upright. The ceiling was covered in yellow bacteria -- when you shone the flashlight on it, it glittered like gold. This was light reflecting off of droplets of water clinging to the hydrophobic bacteria.

There is no light in these tubes, only what you've brought with you. It's deathly silent (we were the only people in this one), the floor is uneven, sometimes covered in collapsed rock or lava debris, steep, dusty, slick; the ceilings are sometimes very low and jagged. Although we knew this cave was generally a figure 8 it seemed to have many more offshoots (and looking at a map of it later would confirm this). It makes for a very spooky experience. We came back the way we came in because we were afraid of getting lost.

We then stopped at the Hopkins Chocolate Cave but couldn’t find the entrance. This one supposedly had walls that looked like melted chocolate.

Next was Sunshine Cave, which had two portions that were collapsed, allowing light to enter the tubes.

We continued on to Sentinel Cave, which is one of the only caves in the park with two entrances. We walked straight through and resurfaced on the other side.

After that we left the cave loop where all the previous caves I described existed and drove to Merrill Cave, a cave where visitors once ice skated inside on a year-round ice pond. That ice has since melted thanks to climate change but a smaller pool remains, which could be seen by descending a series of steep ladders, the temperature plummeting the further you descended, until the rails of the ladder were ice cold!

We also visited Skull Cave, formed when three lava tubes on top of each other collapsed, which was decidedly not claustrophobic.

Heppe Cave was next, which was described as having water in some years -- none today, and then on to Valentine Cave, which we thought was the coolest one we visited, named after the day it was discovered on. We were all alone in there. The walls were very smooth and the floor was smooth relative to the other caves we were in and you could see where the lava was slowly extruded through the tunnel. It was like being in a subway. It got very steep towards the back so we turned around before the end.

Back at camp we made use of the LTE coverage and did some researching. We had seen the news last week that the Canada - US border closure would be extended to July 21st. Uh oh… we were supposed to head up on July 11th and stay until August 2nd.

It took a little bit of dancing but we pivoted to the west and landed on the big island of Hawai'i. There are four passport stamps on the island -- three national historical sites and one National Park, with one sticker for Numa (Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park).

It took me six hours to hash out a rough plan -- we will bikepack the island over 20 days, circumnavigating it. Our Tour de Hawai'i.

Having our Canada situation figured out we felt much better and ended the day with another spectacular sunset. In the morning we packed up and made way for Crater Lake National Park.