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| Here's the sign at the entrance to Ape Cave. |
The stairway into Ape Cave. |
Looking up at the stairs from inside the Cave. |
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| It's completely dark in the cave. It's also only 42F, which meant that our breath provided lots of water droplets for the camera flash to reflect off of! It made taking pictures very challenging. |
Anna smoking. (Okay, so it's just the flash reflecting off the water vapor, but still...) |
At the beginning, the ground was mostly mud. Later it was either large boulders, or very rough basalt. |
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| The hot volcanic gasses re-melted some of the rock and created interesting patterns. |
In some places, the rock piles were very high. You can see the white fungus on the ceiling. |
More boulders. |
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| We rested a couple of times on the rocks. |
When the rock cooled quickly, it left a very 'swiss-cheese'-like texture. The cave is damp, but there's not a lot of running water, so the rock is very rough -- like coral in places. |
The ceiling was white with fungus in many places. |
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| This slab fell down from the ceiling. Luckily we didn't have to go over it. |
There were several holes in the wall. |
This is a tiny, tiny lava wall. The real one is a sheer 8 feet, with a single foothold cut for a 6-ft tall flexible man. |
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| The ceiling was low in several places, and had tiny stalactites. |
Anna walking through one of the narrower tunnels. |
The ceiling surrounded by two lava tubes (they stretched to the ground, about 15-20 feet here.) |
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| We ran into an area of very red rock. |
Here, we eventually had to sit down and slide to get around the high rock and low ceiling. |
Anna, scouting ahead. |
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| Some of the areas were quite high. |
Very interesting pattern on two rocks. |
The permanent pool of water about 3/rths of the way through the cave. |
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| At its smallest point, we had to crawl on our bellies for about 8-10 feet. Anna is sitting on the ground here, getting ready to go through the tunnel. |
There were several long, deep holes in the walls opening into lava tubes. |
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| Looking up one of the smaller lava walls. Did I mention the 8-foot lava wall? We were too exhausted and distracted at it to take pictures, unfortunately. It was *hard*. |
There is a skylight about 3/4ths of the way through that has a permanent set of rotting wood and moss. Anna says salamanders would like it, but we didn't see any. |
This is the exit (lots of fog from our breath, but you can see the ladder to the upper left.) |
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| The exit, from the outside. It was very narrow and hard to get through with a pack. |
Seeing the light was very shocking and odd. |
It was strange to not have to use a flashlight to see things. After walking in pitch darkness for 3.5 hours, you get quite used to it. |
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| The upper entrance is at a giant sinkhole. Anna shown for scale. |
The walk back was very pleasant, although oddly well-lit by the sun :). |
We found another collapsed lava tube that had enough soil on it to support large conifers and a lot of moss. |
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| Slug! |
Further on, there was a forest killed by the recent (1983) eruption of Mt. St. Helens. |
We left the trail to go exporing the rocks. |
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| I'm king of the world! |
Broken rocks, dead trees, but an alive forest in the distance. |
The trees were stark against the late afternoon sky. |
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Near the end, we found a lava flow from the 1983 reuption. It had followed a streambed and nothing had grown on it yet. |
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