Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Black Cave and Little Beauty Cave

Headed back into the Lincoln National Forest today with some friends from work to check out some caves. We parked past the Dark Canyon Lookout Tower just before the section of road that's so rough its called the "Dragon's Teeth".
Hiking to Caves
Edna, Joel & Big Cairn
From there we followed some trails to Black Cave.
Eric Entering Black Cave
Parts of Black Cave, like the name suggests, are quite black in color. Is it manganese oxide? I don't know but it was sure an interesting little cave.

Inside we saw cave crickets,
Cave Cricket
lots of formations,
Eric in Black Cave
and a bat skeleton encased in calcite.
Bat Skeleton in Calcite
We spent about an hour exploring as much of Black Cave as we could from the trail.
William on the Trail
Then we headed out. We ate a snack outside the cave entrance and then hit the trail
Cactus Flowers
to find our second cave, Little Beauty. Little Beauty is appropriately named. it is small, and there are some nice, inactive formations inside.
Little Beauty Entrance
After a few minutes inside Little Beauty we were outside in the heat ready for our hike back to the car and the long drive back to Carlsbad.         

1 comment:

Ben said...

That bat encased in the calcite is AWESOME!