Shortcut to China

It's 81 degrees out, put on your sweatshirts, your long pants and your hard hats. We're going caving. Equipped with our own two lights and flashlight number 13, we set off for the Mushpots, our first trek here into the bowels of the earth.

Fourteen explorable lava caves line Cave Loop Road at Lava Bed's National Monument in Northern California. Eight more accessible caves lie to the north and south. In total nearly 200 caves have been counted within the monument boundaries. Caution signs posted by each vertical hole in the ground are the only indication that another world lies beneath this dry desert land.

Skull Cave and Merrill Cave to the north are ice caves. Symbol Bridge and Big Painted caves are imprinted with ancient wall paintings, and Valentine Cave to the south is colored with red lava. Hopefully we will have time to explore them all. The only thing keeping us from spending more than the next six hours hidden from the sun may be that the flashlight is due back at the visitor's center by 4:30. Perhaps this is a good thing, for beneath the earth, the sense of time is lost.

Our adventure through the Catacombs Cave proved this. It took well over an hour to pass through the network of tunnels and passageways that sprouted from its walls. But to me, it felt like only minutes. As we crunched over lava rocks and edged around drippings of chocolate looking lava-cicles, getting deeper and deeper into this tunneled web, my notion of time disappeared.

Each cave that we explored was unique. Their commonality being only that they were formed by hot moving lava centuries ago. Some, like the Catacombs Cave, are a labyrinth of looping hallways. Some are pocked with sky lights and lead to expansive vaulted rooms, and some are frozen homes to drippings of colorful ice, their floors buckling and folding in the direction of lava flow.

The cave that impressed me the most was Skull Cave, named so because a wagon load of animal bones (antelope, deer and cattle) along with two human skeletons was found deep in its darkness. It is a mystery as to how they got there. The entrance to Skull Cave is enormous. A deep gorge extending before it indicates that this cave was once much longer. The sheer weight of the lava may have caused the collapse of that portion.

When we entered the cave, sunlight guided us down lava steps past several feet of boulders, illuminating the ceiling of green and gray lava chunks hanging high overhead. As the light faded, we descended three steep, narrow stairways to a depth of 100 feet. The drop in altitude, as well as the sudden drop in temperature, was gripping. From there the floor swept increasingly downward and inward. Perhaps a shortcut to China? With our heads hung low, we stepped with caution over a sheet of black ice. Because it was warm, most of the ice formations had melted and further in deep muddy pools forced us to end our exploration early.

Despite the steep ascent back up and the tight squeeze against rock walls, this was not the most strenuous cave that we visited. Golden Dome Cave holds the title for that. At Golden Dome's entrance is a vertical ladder. Wide enough for one, it drops you 25 feet to the cave floor. Where the sky leaves off, a jagged ceiling of yellow mineral spotted lava begins. The ceiling's biting edges narrow, widen and then narrow again through each passage. Finally the ceiling closes in as the floor becomes littered with high boulders. The footing became treacherous with crevases hidden between each step. At one point a stumble sent my head smashing into the cave's sharp wall. My $3.25 plastic hard hat was cracked, but fortunately my precious skull was in tact.

Bending, crawling, scrunching, we made our way from one domed room to another. The walls in each room were matted with rivulets of hardened lava and mineral deposit droopings and the ceilings dripped honeycombs formations in white, green and yellow.

In each of the five caves that we visited I felt as though the walls held a power. The power of the heat that created them and the now cool deadly darkness that engulfed me. It was this power and the mysteries in this underworld that captivated me.

And so it was that I spent the day burrowing down under, exploring and pushing further and further into the earth. We didn't find China, but each time we emerged from a hole in the ground we were greeted by the china blue sky, and that to me was China enough.