Spelunking

A few weeks ago a friend of mine decided she wanted to try spelunking, and she found an introduction to caving tour at Timpanogos Cave. They take only five people a day, and you get to go into parts of the cave regular tourists don't see. You get to wear cool headlamps and crawl through tight spaces and be in the dark and find an underground lake. Sounds fabulous; sign me up! When our first choice of days didn't work out, we decided to go on the 21st. Sweet, birthday adventure for me!

So we got to the base early, since they had told us it takes an hour to an hour and a half to hike up the trail to the cave. Yeah, that's the time it would take if you have small children or old people with walkers. We got up there in 40 minutes, so we spent some time taking pictures (most of which will be used only for blackmail purposes), talking to a very nice guy from Switzerland, and annoying a park ranger until he let us take pictures with him while we took turns wearing his hat.

Finally they took pity on us and decided to start our tour early. So we got our cool hats with the headlamps, put on our jackets, listened to a few instructions, and got on our way—after we posed for another picture, of course.

I love the look on the park ranger's face; the poor guy probably wasn't planning on hanging out with a bunch of crazy girls, but he got used to us. We went into the cave and took off down the special entrance—off into the dark. Sweet! We scrambled over rocks, squeezed through tight spaces, and shimmied down a ledge. We took more pictures that will be used only for blackmail (your butt tends to hang out a lot when you go spelunking). Here's an action shot of me that doesn't show my butt. Thank you, large rock, for being in the right place.

We saw lots of amazing rock formations, including cave bacon, cave popcorn, and a stalactite formation named Carmel Falls (apparently caving makes people hungry). Then we got to the lake.

Yep, that's it. We all thought our park ranger was joking. It's more the size of a small pond, but I guess when you're in a cave, any puddle of water gets to be called a lake. We turned off our headlamps and sat in the dark and silence for a while. That was very cool. We talked for a few more minutes, my friends sang happy birthday, and then we headed back out. It was a much shorter spelunking experience than we were all planning on, but it was a good introduction and made us want to find a bigger cave to explore. We had fun and we all survived, even though I had apparently banged my head on something, because my cool hat was all askew when we took the obligatory after shot. I guess that's why you wear the hats.

So there's another adventure down. This idea of mine to do something new every year for my birthday was an excellent one, if I do say so myself. I can't wait for the next one!