Sunday, 25 November 2012

Multnomah Falls and Ape Caves

Thanksgiving day! This morning we pissed around quite a lot while we tried to figure out what we were going to do. The weather was pretty crap but we weren't gonna let that stop us. We settled on going to Mt St Helens to check out some Ape caves. When we had been on the for a bit Jesse decided the day was looking a bit light so we would head to the Multnomah falls first. This actually meant about a 1.5 hour detour but it was pretty sweet:


There was a lot of old people around that were heading up the track to the top of the falls and Jesse said it wasn't that far so I left my jeans on and didn't really eat anything before setting out. The walk up was pretty steep and Jesse was moving at a hell of a pace. My calves started to hurt like 40 bastards and jeans seemed pretty innappropriate. After we had been walking for about 30min and the people had kinda thined out we decided we must have taken a wrong turn somewhere but it was a pretty cool track with stuff like this on it:


A few minutes later we came across a couple of guys going in the opposite direction that told us we were on a loop track that goes back out to the highway after another 4 miles or so and then you can walk back to the carpark we started at. It was a really cool walk but I wish I hadn't worn my jeans! On the way down we found another waterfall:


All up I think we were about 2 hours or so and it was getting dark. A perfect time to go and explore some caves we thought. The drive to the caves was about a 2 hours so we started out. We ate a couple of muesli (not bloody granola) bars on the way. Not the massive turkey feast that most people in the U.S. would have been eating around the same time. The Ape caves was actually just one long lava tube. It was an awesome place. The lower cave was really easy to walk through and was about 3m high along most of it. There was lots of interesting stuff to check out like this ball thing:


The theory is that it was a rock that was floating along on the surface of a lava flow and got wedged and fused in place. There was lots of layers on the wall and lots of different looking rocks including this stuff:


Which looked like it was from a meteaor or something. Air pockets inside the rock I guess. The whole time we felt like we needed some geo dude telling us about all this wacky shit we could see. We walked to the end of the lower cave which just got shorter and shorter. We speculated that it might just be because it was full of sediment that had been washed down there. We retraced our steps back to the entry point and started up the upper cave. This one was a bit rougher going with lots of places where the ceiling had fallen down that you had to climb over. Lots more wacky stuff here like this:


Which was on the ceiling and looked like the rock had got so hot it was dripping at one stage, then cooled in place. There was also this:


Which was about a 2m drop that we had to climb up. It was great fun. At the top end of the upper cave it just ended in a pretty much flat wall. We were pretty confused at to what had happened but thought that this might be the point where the lava came up vertically into a soft rock layer that it then created the tube out of. Again, a geologist expert would have been handy. Thats Simon Bloomberg now right? We exited the upper cave out another hole in the ceiling and had about a 2km walk back to the car park. in the snow!


By the time we got back to town we were pretty hungry but it was 10pm and lots of places were closed. We decided to go to a supermarket for food. Unfortunately the deli was closed so there was no hot food available. There was not even a microwave in the hotel room so we couldn't even heat anything up. In the end we had some beers and a pretty pathetic dinner that consisted of a couple of processed turkey sandwiches on stale bread.

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