SOME NOTES FROM, AND ABOUT, APE CAVE

Last Super Bowl Sunday, Jane and I went caving beneath Mount St. Helens.

There were numerous switchbacks as WA-503 wound its way up the mountain. After each, MSH loomed larger and larger ahead. Needless to say, it’s active. These days, on occasion, smoke pours from the top as the volcano rebuilds its lava dome. To someone acquainted with Vesuvius, it’s an awesome spectacle [1].

At the end of NF 8303-60 [2], there was a locked gate. Between the gate and the cave entrance, the half-mile of road was snowed under and impassable. Trees had fallen across it, etc. We pulled into a fifteen-car lot near the trailhead of something called “A Trail of Two Forests.” The landscape at that altitude [3] is quite stately: coniferous trees, a band of mist clinging to the roads, big puddles just at the phase-transition point, where a degree of temperature either way decides whether they are ice or water. There was also a latrine that had obviously not been emptied all winter. Perhaps they keep it that way to frighten off bears. Whatever the reason, it was nauseating.

Munching on Twix, we consolidated our gear into one backpack [4], and set off. En route, we came upon a family readying itself for a group photo beneath the National Forest Service sign for Ape Cave. They asked me to take it for them, and I obliged. I figured it was only fair to keep a mental snapshot for myself.

There were six of them: a mother, a father, two sons, and their respective girlfriends/wives. The mother was about five-feet tall and pear-shaped. She had short, curly gray hair and looked like the sort of woman who could suffer adultery but not divorce. If I had to guess, I’d say she was in her early sixties. The father, also in his sixties, was tall and strapping; wet-brained in the way genial VP’s of mid-cap companies get after a career of martini lunches. Though past his tipping point, he was still obviously the template for the two sons—both of whom were towering, square-jawed, jocular and loud. They looked like Abercrombie & Fitch models, and sounded just like junior sales execs. You know, baritones. Their girlfriends (or wives) were, respectively, blonde and brunette, lanky and squat. I think the pudgy one had a squint. Otherwise, they looked like soccer mom archetypes (perhaps, in the case of the blonde, with a slight drinking problem).

After the photo op, Jane and I charged on ahead of them. The ranger station and info booth were both closed, as was an iced-over parking lot for the cave. Next to the cave mouth, there was a three-sided gazebo containing placards about the site—its geomorphology [5], geology, and ecology [6]. At 2.95 miles in length, Ape Cave is advertised as “the longest intact lava tube in the continental United States.” It is divided into two main passages, imaginatively called the Lower Cave and Upper Cave. The Lower Cave is just under 3/4ths of a mile long and must be hiked down and back. The Upper Cave, considerably more difficult to negotiate, is a “straight” 1.5-mile shot to another point of egress.

While we read all this and wolfed down a quick lunch, the family finally caught up with us. One of the sons read aloud from a placard saying Ape Cave had been named after an “outdoor club called the Mount St. Helens Apes.” De-mouthing a Tofurky, cheddar and pickle on whole wheat sandwich, I pedantically clarified that the “outdoor club” had actually been a Boy Scout troop—who had in turn named themselves after a local legend which involved ape-like creatures pelting two miners with big rocks from a height (a hoax to which some shame-faced teenagers later confessed); and that for years people believed the Sasquatch made its den in the deepest recesses of the cave [7].

We descended as a group into the wide, moss-bearded mouth of the cave—first down an icy stone stairwell, and then a metal one. At the bottom, it was already too dark to see clearly without a flashlight. According to an arrow-shaped sign, the stairs emptied onto the Lower Cave. Behind the stairwell, the Upper Cave’s entrance resembled a toothsome deep-water fish, opening its jaws impossibly wide.

The tunnel walls were moist and black. Some kind of silver, reflective growth clung to them in places. The ceiling was towering and eerily vertebral. H.R. Giger is an obvious point of reference, but another thought occurred to me; namely, that a colossal serpent had been encased in magma, which cooled and hardened. When the dragon rotted away, it left behind an impression of itself in death: the Lower Cave.

Farther in was a point where the tunnel walls bulged toward each other overhead, as if to kiss. Suspended between them was the “Meatball”—a big round boulder of cooled lava [8]. I couldn’t get over how manmade the tunnel looked—as if it were a mineshaft instead of a cave. I remarked how I was reminded of Indiana Jones. Jane agreed, but said something that made me realize she meant Raiders of the Lost Ark, whereas I had meant Temple of Doom. I half-expected to see Dr. Jones whizzing by in an ore cart overhead, a pint-sized Chinese kid behind him hollering, “Indeeeeeee!”

Past the “Meathball,” the tunnel became cathedral again. In my best Ian McKellen (which is awful), I intoned: “Into the Mines of Moria!" [9] Jane was not amused. Despite it being relatively easy to navigate, she found the Lower Cave terrifying. She told me later she was afraid something had followed us down and was lurking behind in the dark. For that reason, she didn’t like having to turn back halfway.

Needless to say, she wasn’t exactly keen on belly-crawling a hundred feet into something that looked suspiciously like an animal’s warren either. As it tapped out, the Lower Cave got narrower and lower, until I had to snake forward on my stomach, using elbows for propulsion. The tunnel opened into a four-foot long antechamber tall enough to crouch in. There was a wall directly ahead with a hole in it. Wriggling through, I entered a tiny hutch littered with sand, pebbles, and a can of Squirt. Opposite the entry hole, there was a five-inch high, foot wide gap where the wall met the floor. I stuck my hand in the hole and felt a breeze, suggesting more cave on the other side. But that’s as far as anyone gets.

Except for the sound of dripping water, the cave was soundless [10]. And dark. On the way back, I asked Jane if we could turn off our headlamps and flashlights. She agreed, so long as I would hold onto her. One by one, we clicked them off. When the last flashlight went, we experienced a darkness so total we could see nothing at all—no outlines, no pixelation, nothing. Our eyes were completely starved. I spent a few seconds turning my head from side to side, exophthalmic, straining for any residue of illumination, before Jane whispered could we please relight the lights? Then, “If you tell anyone I was afraid of the dark, I’ll kill you.”

The “Big Room” leading to the Upper Cave was dominated by a 20 ft. tall breakdown pile completely obscuring the ongoing tunnel. Even from the top of the pile, we couldn’t tell what to do next [11]. While Jane waited just below the summit, I scouted several possible routes. One appeared to extend for at least 100 ft. at the NW corner of the room, but would have required crawling on hands and knees over jagged rock. I then found another, less obvious, running NE beneath a ledge and against a wall of the chamber. Following the route down and around the breakdown, it finally opened onto more cave. As Jane wasn’t able to see me from her perch, I played my flashlight on the ceiling to help guide her down.

The cave was a consistently cool temperature (42 degrees Fahrenheit) throughout. We felt breezes in some passages. Water dripping from the ceiling was a constant. Had we been wearing traditional carbide-torch headlamps, they would have been doused more than once [12]. There were breakdown piles everywhere—some as tall as 20 ft., as wide as 25 ft., and as long as 100 ft. The breakdown consisted of large and small boulders, both wedged firmly together and loosely piled. The floor was uneven, sometimes jagged, and of a black volcanic rock [13]. Infrequently, it was covered in what looked like sand. The height of the ceiling varied considerably—from 1.5 ft. at the end of the Lower Cave to long, 35 ft. vaults in both the Lower and Upper Caves. The tunnel walls were often smooth, and were extensively scored lengthwise with flow marks. Between the ceiling and the tunnel walls, there were some deep ledges that may have also resulted from flowing lava [14].

In case you’re wondering, the family we entered the cave with didn’t last long. We shot past them immediately after the stairs. For a few minutes, we could hear them behind us; then, nothing. We were alone through the whole Lower Cave, down and back. In the Upper Cave, we passed a couple heading in the opposite direction across an enormous breakdown chamber. I explained to them how to navigate the “Big Room.” The guy reciprocated by telling us we had at least thirty minutes (try 1 hr. 30 min.!) to go [15], that there was a skylight up ahead, and that the exit ladder was fifteen minutes beyond that (about which he was spot on).

Thirty-five minutes later, we crested a breakdown pile and found ourselves facing a sheer, eight-foot lava fall that separated the tunnel into two levels. To continue, we had to scale it. I have to admit, my pulse spiked. I wasn’t sure I could get up it, never mind Jane. On closer inspection, however, someone had thoughtfully hacked out a depression 3.5 ft. up the left side of an open-faced chimney around the fall. I took off the backpack. Getting a foot into the depression, I was able to leverage myself high enough up to grab onto a rock spur above the fall and haul myself over. Jane tossed me the gear, planted herself in the groove, got a grip on the same rock I had, and started pulling herself up. I grabbed her by the scruff of her jacket and dragged her over—help she probably didn’t need.

Caving requires a surprising amount of concentration. Even with multiple sources of light, it was dark. The floors were uneven, occasionally treacherous, and frequently wet. Same went for the walls, boulders, and rock piles we had to scramble over for most of the way. It would not have been too difficult to break an arm or ankle, or even one’s neck. At one point, coming over an especially steep pile of rocks, Jane cracked her head on a shelf I had just narrowly avoided. I’d ducked it unconsciously, and was in the process of mouthing the words “Thank you” when she hollered in pain [16].

For about ten minutes, there was a faintly perceptible glow where the cave walls met the ceiling, like a crown molding. Its source: a 3ft. sq. hole in the roof, through which sunlight tore into the cave. Bright green moss on both walls, everywhere the light strikes during the day; and just beyond the moss, whorls of white mold: a whole infracosmos of colors. It was beautiful.

Past the ladder at the end of the Upper Cave, the tunnel continued. We walked upright through a passage, over a low pile of strewn rocks, and into a spacious, ripple-walled, roughly hemispheric chamber where the cave finally tapped out. There were big fracture lines in the floor, running this way and that. In one such fault, I noticed the butt-end of an orange cylinder wedged beneath the surface. Then another. I pointed them out to Jane and, as we reconnoitered the room, we saw them in cracks everywhere—little orange and yellow tubes of plastic. Then it occurred to me what they were: glow sticks. We were looking at the buried evidence of a rave.

Despite a sign at the cave entrance admonishing us to “Take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints [17], kill nothing but time,” I admit I put a tiny red pebble in my pocket for a souvenir. It reminded me strongly of Persephone’s pomegranate seeds [18], and I thought if I took it I might have to stay behind.



When we resurfaced [19], we were miles from the car, in deep snow. At first, we had no idea how to get back. As in the cave itself, there were no signs. Fortunately, others had hiked in and out ahead of us. We simply followed their boot prints until we picked up the first trail marker; after which, it was significantly easier to navigate. The snow and ice were quite slippery. Despite walking heel-to-toe, Jane and I both had a hard time keeping our feet. In total, the hike back took almost an hour. Along the way, we noticed several more skylights—further suggesting unexplored caves. Had these been cut off from the main tunnel by collapsed rocks? Were they entirely separate lava tubes?




I thought about building a field periscope to answer such questions. Jane at the wheel, I pondered its design (the periscope’s, that is) while the rental wound down WA-503, as if repeating our descent; night, the cave.

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[1] NB: I tend to experience nature by analogy. I look at Mount St. Helens, but what I see is Mount Snaeffels, Mount Doom, et al. If that makes me a poor sort of Aristotelian, I’d rather be a Neo-Platonist anyway.

[2] Which is a weirdly bureaucratic name for such a lovely little road.

[3] We were both surprised by the elevation at the cave entrance: 2115 feet above sea level.

[4] Our equipment included Myolight-3 and Princeton Tec Aurora headlamps; two Brinkman 3-Watt LED flashlights; a digital camera; extra AA and AAA batteries; a Gerber folding knife with a partially serrated, 3.75 inch blade (for skinning kobolds); a decent First Aid kit; an amber-colored, one-liter Nalgene water bottle; chow (sandwiches, granola bars, assorted nuts); heavy coats, jumpers, long-sleeve shirts and tees; jeans; thick hiking socks and boots.

[5] Unlike Carlsbad Cavern or Mammoth Cave (both of which were formed by the implacable erosion of limestone), Ape Cave is what is known as a lava tube cave—essentially, a roofed-over segment of feeder channels that “conduct a certain type of unusually fluid basaltic lava…to the advancing front of a lava flow.” There are several types of such caves. Ape Cave, which for the most part lacks branching or upper passages, is classified as an example of “the simple unitary or throughway type.”

[6] Inside the cave, we saw guano but no bats; nor any other critter, save a lone, unclassified insect that buzzed Jane.

[7] Which did nothing to ease Jane’s mind, of course, suffering as she does from a hyper-developed fear of Bigfoot.

[8] It may sound like a scene from Lady and the Tramp, but it looked like a trap out of Tomb Raider.

[9] With respect to questions about “Adventure,” the Tolkien novels, or Dungeons & Dragons, yes, yes, and oh hell, yes! In the Lower Cave, especially, my thoughts kept harking back to D&D. They weren’t memories exactly; at least, not mine. Instead, strange as this may sound, it was like remembering a dungeon from the perspective of one of my characters! I kept expecting an orc to pop up ahead of us in the beam of my headlamp. As you can probably imagine, the sensation was both a little bit eerie and a whole lot of fun.

[10] Excepting an acoustically baffled conference room at the Sprint Labs in Burlingame, CA, I’ve never been anywhere quieter.

[11] One remarkable aspect of caving is that you don’t always know where to go. You have to sort it out yourself. At first, this is a bit intimidating. Gradually, however, you get used to the idea. In the end, I was thrilled to have to “explore” the cave on my own. There is definitely an echo between this feeling and my enjoyment of “Adventure” or Dungeons & Dragons. NB: Jane knew more or less exactly how to exit the “Big Room,” but didn’t want to spoil my fun.

[12] Honestly, the thought of a prolonged stay down there without light is chilling. I can see why the narrator of Journey to the Center of the Earth went mad with fear when, having lost his companions, his lamp was damaged beyond repair. If anything, it amplifies the respect I already had for cavers levelheaded enough to restart their lamps even while repelling or free climbing. That said, I can also see why cavers have transitioned away from exposed-flame carbides, however powerful, to dimmer, but more reliable (and much less expensive), LED-type sources of illumination.

[13] I confess to a profound ignorance of vulcanospeleology and, more generally, of geology. Both as a poet and as a budding caver, it pains me not to know the proper names of the things we observed. We saw pebbles of red pumice, floors of rough black volcanic rock (with spiky protrusions and pores), boulders of smoother red, black, and gray rocks (which last sometimes had whorled patterns on them); white pumice; what appeared to be sand; shiny, ripple-pattern rocks, those with blue-black glazes, and others.

[14] We didn’t follow any of several side passages on this trip, or any cracks that led beneath the false floor. Neither did we attempt to scale any of the numerous ledges, or the section of attic cave that overhangs a length of the main tunnel.

[15] I didn’t notice if he wore a watch. Perhaps, like Siffre, he was simply “beyond time.”

[16] Should I make a habit of caving, I will likely invest in a helmet.

[17] The cave is not pristine. We saw cigarette butts, a smashed Budweiser bottle, eggshell fragments. At one point, we stepped near a bolus of human feces and some besmeared notebook pages. I suspect they were used because of what was written thereon, but I didn’t check. Somewhat mysteriously, we saw tree branches wedged under rocks and in gaps beneath the false floor. Excepting the possibility of human agency, we couldn’t account for how they got there.

[18] It is impossible not to think of Persephone, Orpheus, Aeneas, et al while caving. Don’t even get me started about Dante.

[19] A sign at the cave entrance estimated that the time required for a roundtrip of the Lower Cave and a trip all the way through the Upper Cave was approximately four hours. We went down at 1pm and popped out at 3:46pm.