Yesterday Kristin and I went to a Lave River Tube near Flagstaff, and let me tell you, we spelunked like crazy.
We walked down this trail
and came to a hole in the ground.
We were a little surprised by how busy it was; there were a lot of families. (This is totally the kind of thing I’ll do with my family someday.) Since there were so many people there (some of whom had lanterns), I pretended we were in the cave in Tom Sawyer, trying to get away from Injun Joe.
We were super excited to actually have a reason to wear our headlamps.
The hike begins with quite a bit of scrambling, which is easy going up, but I’m super slow going down. But then the trail levels out. It’s almost like being in a subway tunnel; it’s all rounded, and you can see where the lava was flowing through the cave and just froze in place. (The geography of Flagstaff is really interesting; there are cinder cones everywhere, and when you look at the rocks on the ground, they’re all porous and obviously igneous.)
There were the beginnings of stalagtites or stalagmites or whatever (they look like drips here in this picture).
We hiked about a mile to the end of the cave, where we stopped and made this video.
Overall, we had a blast. I was worried about being claustrophobic, but it wasn’t a problem. Most of it was pretty spacious. There were a few parts where you had to crouch down, but they were brief. And it was so nice and cold in the cave… a really pleasant change from 110 here in Phoenix!
We walked down this trail
and came to a hole in the ground.
We were a little surprised by how busy it was; there were a lot of families. (This is totally the kind of thing I’ll do with my family someday.) Since there were so many people there (some of whom had lanterns), I pretended we were in the cave in Tom Sawyer, trying to get away from Injun Joe.
We were super excited to actually have a reason to wear our headlamps.
The hike begins with quite a bit of scrambling, which is easy going up, but I’m super slow going down. But then the trail levels out. It’s almost like being in a subway tunnel; it’s all rounded, and you can see where the lava was flowing through the cave and just froze in place. (The geography of Flagstaff is really interesting; there are cinder cones everywhere, and when you look at the rocks on the ground, they’re all porous and obviously igneous.)
There were the beginnings of stalagtites or stalagmites or whatever (they look like drips here in this picture).
We hiked about a mile to the end of the cave, where we stopped and made this video.
Overall, we had a blast. I was worried about being claustrophobic, but it wasn’t a problem. Most of it was pretty spacious. There were a few parts where you had to crouch down, but they were brief. And it was so nice and cold in the cave… a really pleasant change from 110 here in Phoenix!
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