 Into the dark
Spelunking in Central Oregon: A hole new kind of exploration
By Garret Jaros
Correspondent, The Sun
It’s pitch black and I’m completely alone. The last of the light from the cave’s opening was snuffed out hundreds of yards back. I’ve managed to walk, squeeze, scramble and crawl through several tight places to make it this far.
I’ve switched off my headlamp so that I can soak in the sensation of being deep into this lava tube cave void of light and sound.
I can hear my heart beating in my eardrums while ghosts of sounds still echo in my head. There is no sense of direction in this inky blackness. If not for the pressure of the basalt below me I might as well be floating in empty space. I open my eyes as wide as possible and move my hand toward my face. There isn’t so much as a shadow of warning before my finger pokes my pupil.
My mind races in the gulf of silence. I wait for it to settle.
This is why I’m exploring the caves of central Oregon, the caves you don’t hear much about, the ones off the beaten path.
A Colorful History
Although there are an estimated 400 caves tucked and tunneled under the volcanic landscape of central Oregon, only a handful appear on most maps.
It wasn’t always that way. In fact, the caves have a colorful human history. But to better understand that history it is important to note the nature of these caves.
In the West there are two main types of caves, limestone with their exotic hanging stalactites and rising stalagmites, and caves in basalt created by the drainage of subterranean lava rivers that leave behind what are called lava caves or lava tubes.
The vast majority of central Oregon’s caves are lava tubes and most of those are located on the flanks of Newberry Volcano.
A.K.A. Arnold Cave
As collected and told in the comprehensive yet pamphlet-sized book Central Oregon Caves, Arnold Ice Cave, located 10 miles southeast of Bend, is at the center of several interesting stories.
At the turn of the 20th century when ice was king and modern refrigeration was still the stuff of science fiction, Arnold was a favorite of Bend residents who would picnic and use the ice from it and nearby caves to make ice cream. At that time, Arnold, which is reported to have undergone more name changes than any cave in Oregon, was one of the Crook County Ice Caves.
Loggers working the area in the 1920s used the caves to cool their whiskey. But when saloon operators in Bend squared off over control of the local ice market, Arnold took on new significance.
Before refrigeration Bend’s ice supply was gathered from the Deschutes River in winter and stored in sawdust-insulated buildings for summer use.
But ice could be scarce and during one lean year “an enterprising saloon keeper cornered the local ice market and hiked the price to an unheard of 10 cents per pound. This created an immediate handicap for the other two saloon owners, which they solved by quickly surveying and building a road to the ‘Ice Cave,’ where they established an ice-mining operation” that may well have made Arnold Oregon’s first commercial ice mine.
Central Oregon’s caves have sheltered bootleggers and moonshine makers during prohibition, and many were considered as possible shelters for military factories during World War II, then later as bomb shelters and still later as fallout shelters.
In the late 60s, a team from NASA studied several Northwest lava tube systems in connection with the Apollo program. But long before the pioneers, bootleggers and NASA, indigenous peoples used the caves.
Ancient Refrigerator
Charcoal remains at Arnold suggest humans were present as far back as the 1300s, though evidence of human activity in nearby caves may date back 10,000 years.
“You have evidence of the Northern Piute people who were known to store their food, their hunted meat wrapped up in mats made of grass and reeds, inside the caves as almost a refrigeration,” James Jaggard of Wanderlust Tours in Bend says.
Wanderlust offers daily cave tours and is allowed to visit caves closed to the general public in an effort to protect bats and sensitive cave environments.
“So the question we get asked a lot is ‘did people ever live in these caves?’” Jaggard says. “And during the Native Americans time, absolutely not, it would be like us living in our garage or our refrigerator. That’s how they used them.”
Select caves however were used for ceremonies, and artifacts discovered at the Redmond Caves indicate that people did live under the protective shelter of their overhanging entrances.
Home to the Bats
I’m still deep in the womb of Boyd Cave, one of three closely clustered caves out Bend’s China Hat Road. Nearby Wind and Skeleton caves are closed off with iron rails across their entrances. They are accessible only with a special permit like that held by Wanderlust.
Both those caves are bat hibernaculums so when people began abusing them with broken bottles, discarded food, bonfires and beer parties, it not only damaged the sensitive environment, but also sent the bats in search of new roosts in the dead of winter when surface temperatures can be lethal to the sensitive bats. The lava tube caves maintain a year-round average temperature of 48 degrees no matter the temperature above ground.
Biologists with the Deschutes National Forest estimate that nine species of bats hibernate in Central Oregon while several others migrate south. Two common hibernators are the Townsend Big Eared bat and the Myotis or little brown bat.
Contemplating the Urge to go Farther
Despite hearing from Jaggard that bats have returned to Boyd Cave after successful clean-up efforts, I continue to be engulfed in silence as I drop to my stomach and crawl onward as the cave closes tightly around me.
And then suddenly it’s decision time. I wondered if I’d feel claustrophobic but it hasn’t happened until now. I feel fine, but as I inch my way along, sandwiched between the coarse basalt of the cave’s roof and its now sandy floor, using my elbows and feet as paddles to push myself along, the weight of all that earth above me begins to press on my imagination.
Still, I have the inexplicable sense of being drawn deeper. I can feel a breeze coming from somewhere ahead and my headlamp reveals a pocket about 15 feet farther along that will allow me to get to my knees for a short time before the tube again disappears into another tight, dark slot beyond.
I turn off my light and contemplate the almost irrational impulse to push on. Perhaps Wanderlust’s Jaggard said it best.
“I absolutely love caving because there’s always that element of discovery,” he said. “You get to go in and kind of hunt around and find these large tubes and holes all over the place.
“You can be walking along the high desert here in Bend and pass within yards of a cave and not even know it’s there. In fact I’ve found a couple of caves that are not big enough for a human to get into, but you feel the cold air coming out and it’s just an exciting thing to explore.”
In the still darkness I realize my impulse to continue forward is rooted in the sense that I might discover something new, even in this well traveled cave, perhaps a new passage opened by a recent collapse.
Collapse? I switch on my headlamp and with no room to turn begin to back out feet first — the impulse to seek out sunlight and songbirds in the sage above — now tugging instinctively at my common sense.
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