Alpine Scramble - Trail of Two Forests

NOTE: Please don't explore wild caves without understanding the sensitive conservation issues of the cave environment and please never publicly share wild cave locations!

We met up at Trail of Two Forests at 9 AM on Sunday. The three trip leads were cavers who are members of Cascade and/or Oregon Grotto, and we had four enthusiastic participants who were exploring their first wild cave ever!

A couple of us had camped nearby and woke up to rain. Good thing for us we'd be "indoors" most of the day. Someone commented it was the first rock scramble they had been on that wasn't canceled for rain! We headed straight for Lake Cave to get out of the rain and suited up, did intros and briefed just inside the cave. As expected, it was much drier underground! 

After climbing down the metal ladder at the first lavafall, we began our exploration of Lake Cave, and it didn't take long for the scrambling to begin! The floor in Lake Cave is pretty nice and sandy when it's not covered in breakdown, but there are plenty of small pits and lavafalls that required fun friction moves and three points of contact. I will never understand how people explore caves without helmets (we ran into 2 such people). I constantly bump my helmet against the ceiling!

We passed by the erosional side passages and traveled to the end of the cave where, despite the rain and the name, there was no lake (it's seasonal). However, the sandy floor made it a good spot to sit down, have a snack, and experience total darkness. On the way out, we explored the erosional passage so folks could practice as much or as little crawling as they desired! This area of the cave also had numerous tree-casts and charred wood from the original trees.

When we got back to the entrance, we explored the "Red Passage" which was a really striking and beautiful example of the lava "tube within a tube" concept, with a rust-red  lava flow frozen within the larger tube.

Even the rain was forecasted to worsen through the day, when we got to the entrnace the rain had stopped! As this was, perhaps, the first Mountaineers wild caving trip, we  used every opportunity to teach about the fragile cave environment and how the standards for cave conservation is higher than we are even used to as Mountaineers. As such, after eating our lunch we demonstrated White Nose Syndrome decontamination techniques for our gear to help limit the spread of this disease that has been devastating bat populations across the country.

With the weather now pleasant, we headed out to hike over the basalt flow to Ole's Cave. A long lava tube with numerous entrances (sinks), the floor here started out a lot rougher than Lake Cave--not nice on the ankles! There were plenty of interesting things to see here, including some lava formations and some elusive cave critters!

Overall, it was a full day of exploration and rock scrambling!