Spelunking and Speleology

So this post is only a couple of months late but at least it's getting done. Back in August Mark and I took Mira for a trip to Mt. Timpanogos cave. Mt. Timp is the second highest peak in Utah, and several years ago Mark and I climbed to the top of the mountain. It was an amazing experience, although we could barely walk for the next week. But there's a cave inside the mountain, which I'd never gone through, so we decided to give it a go. The cave tour was great, but taking Mira with us probably wasn't our smartest decision ever. To get to the cave entrance is about a 1.5 mile hike up the mountain. Mira walked about a quarter of the way and decided she was done. So we had to haul her protesting and uncooperative butt up the rest of the way, then through the caves, then back down. Mark threw his back out and it still hasn't completely recovered. But on the other hand, we learned that there is a special Introduction to Caving tour where they take a limited number of people off to a different part of the caves and you get to crawl on your hands and knees and climb up and down boulders and stuff to an underground lake. Mark and I both thought this sounded like a blast so we signed up for our spot, dropped Mira off with Mark's parents on the designated day, and went caving!

The pictures didn't come out super great, but it was really cool.

It used to be kosher to break off parts of rock formations, cart them out of the caves and sell them as souvenirs. Luckily that's not allowed anymore but you can see where rocks were hacked off.

 You can see the lake in the background with a measuring stick to tell the depth.

This next picture is neat. Our guide lit a cigarette lighter to show how much light the early explorers would have had to work with.

Something else that used to be kosher for tourists was writing your name on the rock formations. Again, luckily that behavior doesn't fly these days but it's neat to see the remnants. The cool thing is the people who wrote their names in indelible ink just turned into splotches, but the people who wrote their names in pencil, you can still make out a lot of the words.

And some pictures from the hike up/down the mountain. I just love hiking, and every time I go I remember how much I love it and vow I'm going to go more often, and then does it happen? Nope. But man, I need to get out hiking more often.

The city of Provo, a.k.a. Happy Valley.

Anyway, there you go, just a short little post with some cool cave pictures. The next post will have all our Halloween pictures and such. I just wanted to get these pictures up before I completely spaced and it never happened.

Speleology, by the way, is the official term for caving.