Last week I put on my Scoutmaster hat and took a group of 18 scouts and four adults to the Lava Beds National Monument south of Klamath Falls. If you ever get a chance to visit there, it’s well worth the trip.

After the usual scramble to load the truck with gear (nearly forgot the cooking pots) and find seats for everyone, we started the three hour drive.

We ran into trouble about halfway in.  One vehicle broke down 40 miles from anywhere, and it took some creative planning and some unexpected help from a friend we ran into in Klamath Falls to work it out.

We finally got everyone to the campsite by 1:15 AM. While a couple of the drivers spent those last two or three hours shuttling boys to the campsite, I oversaw the setup of tents and encouraged the boys to attempt the dutch oven cakes they had planned.  I made a point of not closely overseeing the effort – to give them a chance to learn how to do it on their own.

The results turned out about as well as one might expect.

First the boys messed up combining the water, oil and eggs with the cake mixes, despite having discussed it at length prior to begining.  So they ended up with three cake mixes in one dutch oven and one in the other.  On top of that, we had too few charcoal briquettes and it became clear as we  huddled around the fire while the temperature steadily dropped that the cakes would never actually finish cooking.

Solution:  put one of them in the fire.

That allowed us to combine charcoal under one cake.

It also taught us all a valuable lesson in dutch oven cooking.  A cake that begins to boil is a cake that is doomed.

We actually tried to eat it when it cooled, but the taste of charred chocolate that permeated the six-inch high confection wrecked it.  The other cake actually turned out pretty well, but took so long to cook, none of us could wait up for it.  Several of the boys munched on cold cake in the morning while waiting for breakfast.

It got pretty cold, down below twenty degrees, but the stars were amazingly bright in the clear sky. I wish we’d had room to bring a good telescope.

A big fire in the morning and breakfast burritos helped kickstart the day Saturday morning.  With great excitement, we headed for the first cave:  Indian Well.  It’s a great beginner cave for the boys who had never been.  It gave us a chance to confirm everyone had helmets, knee pads, and flashlights that actually worked.  The ceiling is high and it’s hard to get lost.

With so many caves to choose from, we could have spent several days caving, but we only had the one day.  So we pushed on to Valentines, one of my favorite caves.  This one’s a long cave, about a thousand feet, with varying heights to the ceiling, but not much crawling.  It’s named Valentines because it was discovered on Valentine’s day, 1933.  It was -12 degrees (that’s twelve below zero!) that day, and Ross Musselman found it by tracking a plume of mist that rose from the warmer air of the cave.

We visited Golden Dome next.  This one’s closed in the summer due to nesting bats, but open in the winter, so we got to visit.  Well worth the trip.  This cave has a lot of gold sparkles along the ceiling – hence the name.  We learned that the gold color is from a kind of fungus or mold that grows in the cave.  Despite that, several of the boys caught water in their mouths that dripped from stalagtites. They all made it home safe, so I guess the water wasn’t too bad.

After eating lunch and packing camp, it was on to Catacombs!

This is the boys’ favorite cave because it’s the hardest one.  It runs a total of almost 7000 feet (That’s about a mile and a half) if one explores the entire thing.  Of course we did, including the long crawl back through the secondary tube.  The crossing from the main tunnel to the secondary tunnel was just as tight as I remember. We refer to it as ‘the womb’ because crawling through it feels like birthing a second time.

We ended the day in Skull cave. After the 1 and 2-foot ceilings of Catacombs, I really appreciated the hundred foot ceiling of Skull cave.

Despite the challenges in transportation, we didn’t lose anyone in the caves. Some of the boys faced their fears of close spaces or darkness, and everyone reported having a great time.  Nothing like crawling through the belly of the earth to recharge for the next week.