Mudcaving...

The adventures of Snoopy continue...From the jungle, now to the desert. The Anza-Borrego Desert. Me, Ben and a bunch of crazy college kids decided that it was time to live on the wild side and go spelunking and find a good cave to get lost in. Well, last Saturday was the day. We all piled into two cars and set out on the two hour drive with sack lunches and excitement in tow. We finally turned on a dirt road and drove another half hour on this crazy dirt road. Bumping along on that back road was almost half the fun. I have no idea how Daniel's car ever made it through that road without completely falling to pieces. But we did blow out his back tire shocks....bummer

All of a sudden we stopped next to this cliff and everyone got out. I turned around and go, "Where's the cave?" And Andrew points to a small shadow and goes, right there! I'm like, thats a gopher hole, there's no way we can every fit in. But I watch in amazement as I watch one of the guys disappear into the hole. When we finally got to the hole, we noticed that you might be able to squeeze in and so we follow the others. Once we were in we did find that it got a little wider, but not big enough to stand up straight in, we had to crawl some of the way, and in others we had to walk sideways to get through. And it was pitch black in there. Each one of us had brought headlamps and I was glad I had bought one instead of a flashlight, I was on my hands and knees for much of the time.

But one time we decided to turn off our lights all-together and see how dark it was. The blackness was beyond anything you can imagine. You couldn't even see the hand right in front of your face. Pitch darkness.

There were quite a few caves in the area and we explores most of them. Some were fairly short before it got so narrow that we couldn't go any farther; in others we would trek for an hour and a half before we finally came out through the other side of the mountain. There was even one cave that we had to climb a rappelling rope to climb a sheer cliff inside a large room of the tunnel. It was amazing to see how tall some of the chimneys inside the cave could be. One of the ones that we tried to climb up had to be 40 or more feet from the bottom of the cave floor.

Towards lunch time we brought our lunch in and ate in one of the larger rooms of the cave. The cave had a small shaft of light at the top, so we turned off our headlights and ate in the semi-darkness. It was really a neat experience.

After a long day of hiking, we decided it was time to return home. We were covered from head to toe in a fine brown dust that was caked on our arms and clothes. But it sure was a awesome time. This is Snoopy, signing out from the caves of the California Desert...

P.S. You can click on the photos and it will enlarge the photo to see it in more detail....;)