Lava Beds

At the last grotto meeting, I shared photos from my trip to Lava Beds National Monument and tried to discuss some of the geology. Needless to say, that doesn’t translate out as a trip report. Therefore, I thought I’d add a trip log here. I won’t bother with the names of the California caves because I don’t need Buford Pruitt summarizing this trip report in the NSS News. Interested parties should refer to the Cave Research Foundation (CRF) pages for official trip reports (cave-research.org), but I don't think you can do that online.

September 21 – Due to a prior commitment, I arrived at the fieldhouse three days after everyone else. Because they sent ME on a wild goose chase looking for cheese sticks in the wrong grocery, I arrived after dark but still found dinner waiting.  They liked my DSLR camera when I pulled it out to take a scorpion photo.

September 22 – My pretty camera got me nominated to join the team exploring a lava tube cave in Modoc National Forest that passed back under Lava Beds NM. In addition to the camera gear, I had to take along vertical gear for a 25-foot entrance drop. The rope landed atop a 150-foot high breakdown mountain with a 40-foot wide passage. While two party members explored down a narrow vertical lead, I traveled with Paul McMullen and Mark Jones along the main passage and collected some photo documentation of the cave. Pretty cool to be the first person to photograph this enormous lava tube and only be the eighth person to ever see it.

September 23 – A geology field trip taught me a lot about basalt, obsidian, pumice, andesite, a’a, and pahoehoe across the Medicine Lake shield-like caldera.

September 24 – One of the longest caves in the national monument still required a bit of mop up work to complete the map. At the first spot, Ed Klausner completed a complicated vertical sketch, and then we descended. I didn’t see any of the ice I heard about on the lower levels. I then supported the four pieces of a hunting stand while Ed climbed a lava fall only to find a dead end. The smaller folks then squirmed into a tight lead at the bottom of the cave while Paul and I looked for other leads and removed old survey marks. Dave Riggs, the park technician along with us that day, told us that the white crust on the walls in this windy cave was actually calcite.

September 25 – Mark Jones and I conducted some mop up survey in the Balcony flow. We were much too big for this passage, especially with me on lead tape. We were able to make visual connections to the surface and even see Paradise, but we were much too large to get to Paradise from our purgatory. We ended up abandoning one survey station near a cave entrance because the iron in the rocks was consistently throwing the compass off by FIFTY degrees.

September 26 – Back to a different cave in the same flow with Dave West and Karen Willmes. While surveying, I dragged my body over the loose volcanic cobble until the room where we looked up to a skylight twelve feet above my head. I prayed for a miraculous rope to drop from the hole, but ultimately we had to return through the cobbly area “where angels fear to tread.” When we put the surveys together, it was easy to locate the nondescript skylight (I’m not sure I’d fit wearing vertical gear) from the surface with compass and tape.

September 27 – As we began our journey back to Reno for the flight home, we took the scenic route through Lassen Volcanic National Park to check out the geothermal features (steam geysers and mud pots).