7 June – Oregon Caves to Klamath

Up at 7:30am….ugh!  Early for us….holiday is turning us into sloths!!! We got the scooter out and rode about 20 minutes to the caves. We booked onto the 10am tour, then pottered around the grounds and bought a very ordinary coffee from the shop while we waited. The cave tour started with a short walk to the cave entrance. 

The cave was discovered in the mid 1800’s by a hunter following a bear. By the 1870’s people had set up a claim around the entrance and were charging a dollar entrance fee. In 1932 there was a chalet built and the caves were declared a National Monument. The tour lasted for about an hour and 45 mins and covered over a mile underground, with the deepest point at 250 ft below the surface.

 It was a good cave system, but not as spectacular as some we have seen. However, it was a challenging tour, with low tunnels, small spaces and lots of steep stairs. Not for the faint hearted, unfit or infirm… The lowest tunnel was only 45 inches tall so was a duck low and scramble. Sadly, the caves have been vandalised over the years, with bits broken off, graffiti and car key scratches. There was even a wedding party in there years ago and a major stalactite was broken off because the bride and groom wanted to stand where it was. When the caves were being “developed”, there was quite a bit of damage done dynamiting passages to make them accessible, and in the late 90’s doors were installed in some of the man-made passages because the changed airflow was damaging the cave structures.

There has been evidence of animals using the caves, with a 36000 year old jaguar skull unearthed during one of the digs. At the exit there were 3000 year old black bear bones.

Leaving the caves we scooted back to the RV and headed to the coast again through the redwoods. We stopped off at the “Trees of Mystery”, a fabulous self guided walk through the redwoods. The trees are just incredible. Thousands of years old and SO BIG!

We rode the sky train (cable car) to the mountain ridge observation deck –awesome! Then down and more of the forest walk. We finished with a fudge tasting in the gift shop then to a nearby RV park at Klamath River.