Two weekends ago we explored Pluto's Cave on the north flank of Mt. Shasta in California. This was part of the weekend trip spent evading smoke from a huge wildfire. ...Wait, did I say a wildfire? There was more than one! Smoke from other fires choked us out of our Sunday plans to hike in the Trinity Alps even though we were fine there just a day ( Read more... )

New Zealand Travelog #36
Hamilton, NZ - Fri, 19 Apr 2024, 5pm

We're back to our cozy apartment in Hamilton atfer another day of adventure. Today's adventure was a stitching together of a few paid tours plus a few completely self-guided things:

• We visited the Ruakuri Cave (vendor link) with a guided tour. On the trip we heard about a few of the ( Read more... )

Grand Cayman Travelog #10
Cayman Crystal Caves, Grand Cayman - Wed, 17 May 2023, 10:30am

Today we're on another group tour with colleagues from my company, similar to the group trip we took yesterday to hop in the water at Stingray City and Starfish Point. Today's trip is all on land. We're visiting a set of natural caves and then a big flower ( Read more... )

5 Days in the Desert travelog #15
Cima, CA - Sun, 25 Dec 2022, 5pm

I left off in my last blog entry with us descending into the bowels of the earth after an hour+ long drive to the remote lava tubes in Mojave National Preserve. I decided that after all that effort I would not be deterred by having to crawl on my hands and knees a bit, so in I went ( Read more... )

5 Days in the Desert travelog #14
Cima, CA - Sun, 25 Dec 2022, 4pm

This past Sunday afternoon- Christmas Day, for those still keeping track amid this prolific series of blog posts about our "5 Days in the Desert" trip- we visited the lava tubes in Mojave National Preserve. This was our third adventure of the day, after hiking the 650' tall sand ( Read more... )

High Desert Weekend Trip-log #11
Red Rock Canyon State Park - Sun, 27 Mar, 2002. 1:30pm

After driving around near the falcon cliffs in Red Rock Canyon State Park we decided to head to a spot in the park simply marked "overlook" on our hand-drawn map. The trek turned out to be both less and more than we bargained for ( Read more... )

From Sunday, 4 August 2019

One of our adventures at Great Basin National Park this weekend was the Grand Palace cave tour. It's a 90 minute ranger-led tour. Our guide was friendly ranger Lucas, whom we'd met and hit it off with well the day before. When he'd said, "I'm sure I'll see you around" he seemed to anticipate we might book onto this ( Read more... )

Mammoth Cave National Park - Monday, 13 Aug 2018, 1pm

This morning we got up early at our hotel in Cave City, KY to visit nearby Mammoth Cave National Park. We reserved spots on a tour departing at 9am for a four hour visit into the caves.

Mammoth Cave gets its name because it's, well, very large. 412 miles of passages have been mapped in it. We ( Read more... )

Southern Oregon Travelog 5
Sunday, 27 May 2018, 2:30pm - Cave Junction, OR

We got up early this morning even after drinking a lot last night to head out for a cave tour at Oregon Caves National Monument. The caves are about 2 hours of driving from Medford, and our reservation was for 10:30am, so we left the house by 7:30 to ensure enough time with ( Read more... )

On Saturday (July 5th) we headed back out again to Malpais National Monument before returning to Albuquerque. We wanted to visit some of the caves around the northern and western sides of the lava flow.

Yes, it's all part of the same lava flow we tromped around the day before (link: The floor is LAVA!). We'd seen numerous slumps where trapped ( Read more... )