Ape Caves

Our adventure right before we went home. This was such a cool place! In Missouri we think of caves as limestone and hollowed out by water with stalactites and stalagmites. This is a lava tube! Unlike the caves back home, this you had to bring your own lights, good hiking gear (to wear) and navigate on your own. Definitely a different twist! This is located close to Mt. St. Helens. Here are the best pics:
Disclaimer: please don't judge my photography on these!!

I don't think he was expecting me to take a pic.

It looks like smoke, but it's just my breath. I had to keep this in mind every time I took a pic because I had to hold my breath or hold the camera way in front of me.



It was difficult to get in focus because it was pitch black!

This looked like someone drove through the cave! Good think we had lights, we'd be tripping over everything!

This was right above our heads. Looks like a rock that's going to fall on you but, obviously now that I look at it, it's connected.

It was a HUGE tunnel at some points!

This is the lower end, at this end it got really small and some people tried to crawl down it as far as they could. These little kids were small enough to crawl farther than me...


So, we hiked back up to where we started and then went the opposite way. We'd had forewarning that it was longer and a bit harder due to boulder piles...but holy cow...
This is the first we came to. Plus, the "flat" areas (flatter than the lower end) were still really rough, I guess not as many people had ventured this way!

We had to navigate these piles all on our own. It was tough!


This is from the top of a wall (for lack of a better term) that we had to "climb" up. There was one little spot where I could put my foot, Chuck was behind me and I had to hoist myself up. YIKES! I'm not a flexible gal in the first place, add to that 7 months pregnant and a belly in the way...glad I made it up! Chuck had Aaron on his back!!!

Here's another part we had to climb up...

At this point, I was getting really tired, Aaron was ticked off because he'd hit his head (not real hard) a couple times and he was getting sick of the dark, so we were trying to move pretty quickly.
This was a natural skylight, really pretty!

And this is the ladder out!!! YAY!!!!


We got out and Aaron got out of the backpack and he was shaking from hunger/tiredness/anger/etc. Poor guy!
This was the hole that was the end. You can't hardly tell there's a hole there in this pic!

A pretty flower.

I think this was harder than the snowshoe hike we went on when I was 7 months pregnant with Aaron. And that was 12 miles!!! This was only a total of about 2 or so (at least in the cave, then we had to hike outside back down to the parking lot). It was very tough, had to have good balance. And when you hit the rock it cut into your skin it was so rough! I got a pretty good gouge on one of my fingers and then it cut up my knee through my jeans.

That's all for today! I have to get my feet up or by 8 tonight they'll be watermelons.