Caving

Our camping trip at Cloudland Canyon was capped with a caving adventure. I was very excited to go because I haven't been caving since we went to the Sandia Man Cave. I was also excited because we would get to wear knee pads and helmets with lamps. Having a fancy helmet with a light was really great, one of my more memorable caving trips was several years ago when our flashlights failed and we crawled out by light of our indiglo watches. These lights were much brighter, greatly facilitating our navigation.

The layout of the cave was unusual: there were large rooms full of boulders to scramble over and small chutes to climb through and tight spaces to squeeze through (this one was affectionately termed the pancake). Most other caves I have been in have had either large spaces or small spaces but not both. There were fewer cave decorations than I was hoping for, there were of course some stalactites but since the most recent cave I visited was Carlsbad, the formations were rather disappointing.
The formations were also completely covered in mud. As you recall the weekend of this adventure was very wet. Caves are underground and water flows down, this meant that there were pools and puddles in the cave. These were pretty to look at and added additional fun challenges to navigate around without getting wet. It also meant that we got very very muddy crawling around.

In all a great adventure.