Tag caves

Into Cave Abyss

After a great two days in Eugene, we packed up the old trusty mini van once again and decided to hit the road and head south. With all four of us in the minivan, things were lively and the drive flew by quickly. We reached the creepy town of Cave Junction around 10pm and decided to see what these Oregon caves were all about. Mike ran into a terrifying-looking gas station to ask directions to the caves. They replied, “its near the greyback.” Mike nodded knowledgeably and ambled back to the van to report the directions. We sat in the van blinking at each other. “What’s a Greyback?”

After passing several casino games, we pulled into Cave Junction’s only hotel where a lady with 1980’s makeup and shoulder pads so large they hit her in the ears told us to head for the greyback to find a camping spot. She gave us a free local newspaper (aka, a tiny pamphlet of nothingness) and pointed up the road. “To the greyback!” We repeated her mantra back to her with a bit less gusto, “to the greyback?!” and made our way out the door.

Eventually, after a beer stop and a few more inquiries, we decided to just find out for ourselves what this mysterious greyback was. Twelve miles up a horribly-constructed road we found a campground and Mike ran past a “CLOSED” sign to inquire again. From deep in the woods a woman’s voiced yelled out, in true Goonies style, “We’re closed!” and then a dog began to bark very close by and Mike and his friend sprinted into the van. No help at the camp site. We drove back down the road and saw a lit phone booth. A mirage in the woods that seemed beyond creepy. I took a picture (yes, its on flickr, no it didn’t turn out very well because the car was bumping along a dirt road as I took it). It turned out the phone booth belonged to a man who ran a camp site. Score! He installed us in an RV lot for 16$ and we set about making a fire and cooking our dinner. Only after we finally figured out how to assemble the tent did we realize the rain cover was full of holes.

Mike and Lu in Oregon Caves

In the morning, the forest seemed only slightly less creepy. We packed up our camp site  after making some breakfast on what was left of the fire, and headed deeper into the woods to solve the mystery of the greyback. You just can’t stop for intrepid explorers eager for discovery.

The Oregon Caves system is a national monument. And we learned from our 90 minute tour of one of the caves that a monument is a presidential decree rather than an act of congress.  Hopefully that helps you down the road in bar trivia. Our national monument ranger wore the typical OD green suit and funny ranger hat, and talked to our group of adults like we were perhaps 6 or 7 years of age. She told us stories in a drawn out tone, and even called us kiddos. She led us deep into the heart of a cave, some 200m underground. It was a dark, creepy and yet beautiful experience. Unfortunately, in our attempt to preserve the cave someone cut it all up to put in cement floors, stainless steel stairs, railings, ramps, lighting, cables for lighting and emergency exits. Its really not much of a natural thing anymore, its more like a movie set on Batman. My hypothesis– if humans find it, its screwed.

Nevertheless, we enjoyed the tour through tiny, musty cave rooms that looked very strangely like our first apartment in China. We scaled up and down slippery steps, around hanging stalactites and over pointy stalagmites. We even had to duck once. Eventually we left the caves without interacting with any live nature, and we drove back through Cave Junction (still creepy in daylight) and onwards towards California. While we never did learn what a greyback was, some mysteries are better left unsolved.

Mike in the Creep Zone

Although not in any guidebook for the area, our hostel owners told us about a cave not far from town that we could get to only via a cab. We linked up with Emily and decided to try our luck negotiating a cab to the spot. When in town, we easily found an elderly man (in his 90s!) who agreed to take us in his equally ancient Lada car to the caves. We all piled in the death-trap of a car and rattled off into the hills.

Our friendly driver deposited us safely at the entrance to the cave, where a national park ranger who looked like the sneaky guy in Mr. Deeds told us to wait fifteen minutes. In my broken Russian I understood him to mean that an event happened every hour on the hour in the cave, and we sat about for fifteen minutes pondering what the event could be: feeding time for the bats, or an old faithful type explosion?

The event turned out to be a guided tour by the Mr. Deeds sneaky guy, who laughed at our ridiculous expressions when he unlocked a large metal door covering the cave entrance. Inside, he flicked a series of switches and the cave was semi-illuminated. We climbed down into the belly of the cave, and listened to the dripping as he explained that it took a century for the stalactites to grow one centimeter. In front of us were stalactites and stalagmites that ranged from inches long to over a meter. A group of Georgians joined our tour and translated for us along the way, instructing us to keep a wary eye out for some of the white bats that call the cave their home.

We inched ever deeper into the cave as the guide hopped around like an expert spelunker with night-vision capabilities. A hole in the cave a meter off the ground turned out to be a cave 30m into the belly of the beast, which our guide proudly said he had explored. “That’s where the spiders and worms live,” he said, as calmly as if telling us about his boring day.

We snapped pictures, letting the flashes of our cameras illuminate further into the cave than the eye could otherwise see. After what felt like forever (but turned out to be about ten minutes) we reached the largest of the stalactites, which our guide called “the heart” there was an opening and we were instructed to reach our arms into the opening and feel how soft and cool it was inside. I let everyone else go first, hoping the plethora of arms reaching into the heart would scare away any albino creatures inside. It was indeed squishy and wet inside the heart, and I held my hand into the abyss as long as possible before a tickling (or imagined tickle) made me jerk my arm out to the guide’s endless amusement.

Outside the cave again, and thankful for the light, we scampered up the hill to the driver and asked him to take us to some dinosaur footprints we had passed on the way in. These turned out to be two large limestone platforms with various sized giant-turkey footprints from ancient dinosaurs. We walked around atop the limestone like you’d never be allowed to do in the States, and took pictures of our hands inside the footprints, and our toes looking tiny inside the claw prints. After a while, the driver took us half way back to the city before jumping out of the car and running into an alley. He returned a while later with pomegranates fresh from a tree, and then we putted off down the hill into town again.