Ubertrip, Day 2:
Lukas set the air conditioner in the hotel room to about 4 Kelvin, which made getting out of bed after only four hours of sleep that much more painful. We went to the airport to get Aaron. Luckily, he arrived on time and without a problem.
Finally, we got ahold of someone at the house Nichol was supposed to be staying at. She wasn't there, but he confirmed that she was in town, so it was all clear for me to drop off my rental car and for the trip to begin in ernest.
The drive down to carlsbad was the usual 4.5 hours of total boredom. Aaron and Lukas had a lengthy discussion of movies and we all listened to a selection of electronic and industrial music prepared by Luke and A-ron.
I was really worried that someone would find the Roswell alien schtik "cute" and would want to stop there. Luckily, however, everyone was as repulsed by it as I was.
Arriving at the Dark Canyon lookout tower at about 4:45pm, we began the hike to Black Cave. This is where I made my first major blunder of the trip. We left everything we wouldn't need in the cave back in the Blazer, and this included my emptying my pockets of everything including the cave gate key. We got all the way to the entrance (1.5 miles) before I realized this. Aaron and I walked all the way back just to get the key, then all the way to the entrance again. This was a 40 minute delay.
The cave entrance, like last time, was full of harvester (daddy long-legs) spiders. Aaron brushed them away with a stick and braved the gate to open the lock. Once inside and the gate locked behind us, we left our hiking gear behind and got ready for some real wild caving.
The entry room was somewhat uninspiring. It had a flat dirt floor, a low ceiling, no formations, and was rather small. There were small holes at each end, one with the gate and the other leading farther into the cave. Once we went through this little opening, however, the cave suddenly became amazing.
There were formations everywhere, and it was very active. The main passage continued straight back into the mountain for a long long ways. Several side passages broke away from the main passage, but we kept going forwards until we reached the end of the flagged trail. There was at least one passage that continued on in that direction, but it was not flagged so we didn't continue. The side passages proved to be dead ends with the exception of one, which led to a small room with a pool at the bottom and exits in every direction. Getting over the pool required some technical climbing and the group as a whole wasn't up for it, so we didn't explore any of these passages.
We spent about two hours in this cave, and everyone had a great time. I expected the cave to be smaller than it was. The others, not having been caving before, thought it was huge.
When we left the cave, we found that the sun had set and that darkness was quickly encroaching. In the 20 minutes it took to return to the lookout tower, it became completely dark. We tried to search for the entrance to Cottonwood Cave, but couldn't see any trail that led in the right direction. We did find some birds sleeping on the ground who's eyes glowed in the flashlights from a distance.
Giving up on Cottonwood, we headed back down the mountain and to John's place in Carlsbad. Lukas and Allana went immediately to sleep; Aaron and I went for a quick swim in the pool.
