The Timpanogos Cave is a fascinating experience and also a major heart stress test. The tours of the three cave complex have a limited size and are spaced about an hour apart. Luckily we got there before the busy season and I was able to obtain a ticket without an advance reservation. Lori passed and missed all this experience.
I did not take pictures on the way up because I had only a little over an hour to hike a mile and a quarter to make the next tour. That sounds really easy until you understand that is 1100 feet of elevation or climbing well over 2000 steps. The picture here is the cave exit and then the trail from the exit. The other picture is from about a third of the way down and can you spot the school bus parked at the start?
A lot of the interior formations are rather standard if you've been in a cave before. The largest here is called the Heart of the Mountain
because of it's size and shape. Some of the stories they have about the initial cave exploration are also rather scary. Apparently some of the first people into one of the three caves fell through the egg shell thick floor and ended up quite a ways down without a light. Not exactly Lori's favorite concept of fun or mine either for that matter.
The Timpanogos Cave is also famous for these curly stalactites which have not been discovered any other place in the world. Normally the stalactites hang down and the stalagmites grow up from where the overhead drips. No one has determined why these unique structures twist and turn.
As I recall what looks like a little hole in the canyon wall is the cave entrance. The trail splits after about a mile up with one branch going to the entrance and the other to the exit. In rearainging the camera bag to get through the cave I had left my hiking poles at the entry and was seriously debating if they were really worth the climb back up when a ranger showed up with them to meet us. WONDERFUL!
This was late May and the cave had just recently reopened for tours. Due to the elevation it is closed most of the year and you can see here where they had cleared the trail through one of the snow filled gullys. While I am not terribly excited about caves I do love tunnels and it seemed rather cool they made the path through rather than just blast it out.
In some places the path became rather narrow where it seemed like an engineering tossup of blasting out the wall or just veering a little to make another tunnel. Although there is still snow in sheltered places there were also alpine wild flowers growing along the trail. At each switchback there was also another stunning vista looking down over the mountains.
And here at a switchback without a stunning overlook is a little critter making haste in the spring sunshine.