Tionesta, CA - Lava Beds Nat'l Monument

It has amazed us how few people seem to know about Lassen and Lava Beds. This region of our country is beautiful high desert with volcanic mountains and crater lakes. In addition to all of its unique characteristics, this area is just downright fun!

Lava Beds National Monument has over 300 known caves. And here is the incredible part - you can explore all of them on your own. It's like being on your own private Wild Cave tour. They just recommend helmets, long sleeves, and flashlights. We'd add: redundant flashlights, gloves, and, what we are deeply missing, knee pads and elbow pads. You can buy a book of cave maps, but we found after doing a couple of caves, that it is quite fun not knowing what to expect. Sure, we might be missing a tunnel or so, but the unknown is exciting enough for us on our first visit.

These caves are lava tubes. So it is fascinating to look for the flow pattern of the lava. So instead of looking for stalagmites and stalactites, we were looking for lavacicles (where the lava dripped off the ceiling), lava drips (where you could see the lava hardened on the sides of the walls as it dripped down), lava benches, and so many different formations than we've seen in other caves.
Here's Andy choosing the lower tube of a "tube-on-tube". Here's the entrance to a cave called "Labyrinth".
Here you can almost see where the river of lava thinned out and hardened, creating the floor of the tube. It almost looks like a walkway.
Here I was contemplating whether to keep going...if only I had elbow pads I would have. Lava rock is not the most forgiving rock. Trying to carry your body weight on your elbows without padding can be quite uncomfortable.Each cave we've been in so far have been very different from eachother. Different colors, different formations, some wetter than others, etc. So far we've seen a cave cricket, a millipede and two bats. Andy was crawling around in a small alcove when the first bat flew out right behind him. I immediately squealed "Bat!" and then bit my lip. Andy had specifically told me he did not want bats flying around him when he is in tight quarters. This critter could've touched Andy's butt with his wings, he flew that close. I refused to tell Andy the details until he crawled back out of the alcove. This was a big bat with big ears...like the ones you see in the old Vampire movies. The second one we saw was no bigger than the palm of my hand.