Thither & Yon

Lava Beds National Monument: lava as far as the eye can see! Well, not hot lava. This lava hasn’t been hot for at least a thousand years. It’s cool. Really cool.

(See what I did there?)

So. Cool lava. Miles and miles of black, broken landscape standing testament to the power of the earth. When these volcanos erupted thousands of years ago, the hot, flowing lava created tubes as the outside edges of the flow cooled into a shell, allowing the lava in the middle to continue flowing. Eventually, the volcano stopped producing new lava, and the shell emptied out, leaving tubes of solidified lava, which I now get to explore because NATIONAL PARKS ARE SO COOL.

We spent all day at Lava Beds NP, probing the depths of eight lava caves, some of which were dozens of feet long, some of which stretched for more than a mile. The park service provides one practice cave (Mushpot) with lighting and signs telling you what you’re seeing, but after that you’re on your own. Bring your own boots, bring your own lights, and be bound by nothing but your own limitations (and a few very polite requests, like: don’t poop in the caves).

Eight caves is a lot, and while I never got bored of seeing what was down the next dark tunnel, the total miles we traversed – sometimes over very rough terrain – and the extreme heat of the day (topping 101 degrees at one point) began to wear me down. A big, nasty, 2.5-mile surface hike to peer into Mammoth Crater wasn’t exactly relaxing in that heat, either.

I felt a lot like wrapping up my day after that big nasty hike, but I hadn’t yet seen the PICTOGRAPHS.

Rock art is one of my jams. I could not leave the park without visiting Big Picture Cave and Symbol Bridge where ancient Native Americans had painted figures and symbols on the rocks surrounding the entrances to two caves. To reach them, however, required a .75-mile hike. Each way.

Gotta do it. At least, I reflected, it is flat.

The 4:30 sun beat on us as we trudged up the sun-roasted, fire-scarred, drought-parched trail. So dusty. So many burned stumps. The lava flow we were crossing was old enough that it had been mostly reclaimed by vegetation, but a wildfire last summer had undone all the green progress. This world was rendered in monotones. Hiking this trail was pure duty.

At this hour and heat of the day, not many other folk were out on the surface hikes. The smart tourists had done this hike early in the day and had now retreated to the beautifully cool underground portions of the monument. We did pass a few other weary travelers, though, and about halfway up the trail we encountered a boy of about eight years, shuffling back toward the parking lot all alone. He looked as sun-wilted as I felt.

As he approached us, he looked up and caught my eye. I smiled at him.

“Are you going to see the pictographs?” he asked.

“We are!” I replied. 

“They’re fading away,” the boy said sadly. 

“What, right now as we speak?” Dustin asked. 

“Yeah,” the boy said. 

“Then we’d better hurry,” Dustin said. 

“You’ll have to look pretty hard,” the boy added. 

“We’ll do that,” I agreed. “Thank you for the tip!” 

The boy resumed his trudge down the trail, then pulled himself up short and spun back around to face us.

“Have you seen Skull Cave?” he called.

“Not yet,” I said. 

“Oh, it’s…” The boy’s eyes swept from side to side as he searched for words adequate to describe his feelings about Skull Cave. At a loss, he shrugged and produced a huge grin. “You’re gonna love it!”

I almost laughed. “I can’t wait,” I said. 

“Okay, bye!” the boy said, and headed down the trail with a noticeable increase of spring in his step.

We arrived at Big Picture Cave what felt like three hours later, and I basically threw myself down the boulder slope into the shadow of the cave entrance. Lava tubes, like most caves, clock in around 50 degrees year-round. The breath of cool air that greeted me was paradise.

I waited for Dustin to join me, then we began picking our way down the trail. With fragile cultural artifacts to protect, Big Picture Cave required visitors to stick to an established trail rather than allowing the willy-nilly scrambling we’d gotten up to in the other caves. This late in the day, I was happy enough to have my hand held.

The cave already hosted two visitors, a man and woman, who were shining their lights hither and thither, calling out to each other about pictographs they saw or imagined. I suppressed a wave of irritation. I guess we couldn’t have all the caves to ourselves.

Dustin and I followed the trail deeper into the cave. My strategy in these cases is to start by soaking in a grand sense of the place, attempting understanding the nature of where I am and how the place might be experienced before focusing in on the details.

“You’ve already missed two,” one of the other visitors said, interrupting my basking. “You have to look at the rocks all over,” she advised from her seat of greater experience. “See, right there, behind you. And there.”

“Oh,” I said, chagrinned. “I see.” I made a face at the woman, aiming to appear grateful but probably hinting heavily at my annoyance. “Thanks,” I mumbled, not wanting to offend but also hoping maybe she’d take the hint and leave me to my atmospheric absorption.

“It just goes a little farther around there,” the woman said, indicating the path we were both standing on. The path that only went one way. “Goes down a bit then there’s this great big hole with cold air blowing out of it. There are a bunch of pictographs all around over there by the hole.”

Spoiler alert!! I wanted to shout. Big holes full of cold air are way at the top of the list of cave treasures I love unexpectedly stumbling upon. 

“Uh huh,” I managed to say. I edged past her with my eyes furiously directed at my next steps along the path, trying to loudly broadcast my disinterest in hearing any more advice.

The woman either got bored with my lack of engagement or decided to go after an easier mark, because she left me alone and returned to heckling her husband about why he couldn’t see the perfectly obvious pictograph she was pointing right at.

I arrived at the delightful big hole which was puffing great gusts of cold air, as advertised. The woman had ruined the surprise of it, but it was too cool (there I go again!!) to not impress me anyway. I hovered around it, admiring its depths, shadows, and breezes until the woman’s voice faded back into the sunlight. Only then did I start inspecting the surrounding rocks for pictographs.

The boy on the path had not been wrong. These pictographs had faded significantly, becoming hardly more than shadows on the already deeply shadowed rock walls. Dustin and I spent fifteen minutes working our way back up the path, scanning the cave walls and rubble for the dots, diamonds, and Xs that characterized the art left in these caves.

By the time we reemerged into the sunlight, I’d mostly shaken off my annoyance at having had my pictograph experience tourist-splained to me, but I still entered the shade of Symbol Bridge with some trepidation lest my unwanted guide be waiting here as well. We had no company in this second cave, though, and I got to absorb the rocks and pictographs there at exactly my own pace.

These paintings had hardly faded at all, and I wondered if my small friend on the path had made it this far. Perhaps he would not have felt so disappointed if he’d seen the bright suns and ecstatic swoops on these rocks.

But then I remembered the grin on his face as he’d recalled his visit to Skull Cave. 

“You’re gonna love it,” he’d said. He knew nothing about me, but he had loved Skull Cave so much that it was inconceivable to him that anyone else might not share his enthusiasm for it.

Skull Cave had not been part of our game plan. With the clock ticking on toward 6:00, with ten caves now under our belts, and with one more stop planned to see Petroglyph Point, adding yet another cave to the itenerary had seemed unnecessary.

But that grin. That total assurance. You’re gonna love it.

“I have to see Skull Cave before we go,” I told Dustin as we limped off the 3,000-mile trail to our car. 

“Okay?” he said, the surprise in his voice covering all the reasons already mentioned for not doing another cave.

“The boy said we would love it,” I offered. Dustin shook his head and followed me up the short path to this final cave.

Skull Cave was not my favorite of the eleven caves we visited today, but it was amazing, and my trail-friend’s unabashed enthusiasm made the quick visit we paid it feel like a kind of victory.

No one can tell me how to experience these parks. I need to come to them on my terms, following my own goals. But I will listen to anyone, and I mean anyone, tell me about something they love. Real enthusiasm is infectious and almost always a true guide to seeing/hearing/learning/tasting/reading something wonderful or exciting that I may not have chosen left to my own devices.

Thank you for the tip, trail buddy. I hope more amazing things have been filling your days.