Jake, Kim and I took off for another weekend adventure near Mount St Helens, this time to go caving. We left early Saturday morning and drove for around 4 hours to get to Ape Caves. There was a tour group leaving as we got there so we joined it. It started out with about 15 boy scouts on the tour but they left almost immediately to do their own thing, thankfully. We first hiked the lower caves section and had to crawl to get to the very end. Then we turned around and headed for the harder upper section hike. There were a lot fewer people doing this section, which was nice, but it still definitely wasn’t secluded. There was some scrambling over rocks and one tall rock wall that was probably the equivalent of a VB gym boulder route. It was fun to hike around three miles underground.
Once we hiked back to the car we drove up a forest service road and found a place to camp. It looks like it was a site that hunters had been using. They had even built their own outhouse out of tarps. We couldn’t get a fire started with all the wet wood, and it was cold for July! It was down in the upper 40′s that night. We fell asleep and heard rumblings from the distance that we were a little worried might be the volcano, but I didn’t see anything in the news about activity. It rained all night and was cold and wet the next morning so we headed back early Sunday.
[...] Next we headed for Volcanoes National Park. When we got there we hiked the Kilauea Iki trail through the bottom of a crater. We also saw the Thurston Lava Tube, but didn’t think it was nearly as impressive as Ape Caves near Mt Rainier. It started to pour as we were in the lava tube, so we opted for a hostel that night, which was good because we had internet access to book our flights to and from Kauai and schedule rental cars. Our new Black Diamond Betamid tent has worked great, even in rain, we just didn’t want to setup in rain. [...]
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