Wonderful Places

Last weekend Grayson, John and I took a short day-trip to Devil's Den to do a bit of walkabout. John tells me I can't call it hiking if there's a trail and you don't carry a backpack, or something like that. I consider it hiking if I'm outside walking in the woods for its own sake, but I suppose it's arguable that if John can do the entire trail in flip-flops it doesn't really count as "hiking."

Nevertheless, it was an enjoyable hour and a half's walking, with a fair amount of uphilling, so it counts in my book.

My point is that the location is pretty remarkable. It's an area full of crevices and crevice-caves. The ground has tipped and cracked open to create these wonderfully spooky cracks in the rocks. They breathe cold air and have a slightly sinister air.  No wonder the area is called Devil's Den. It does seem as if it was broken open by some monstrous creature.

I loved it. I wanted to crawl down in all the crevices and explore, but the caves are closed to help protect resident bats from White Nose Syndrome, and access to the crevices was restricted, as well. I'm too much of a rule follower to walk far past a sign that says "Closed" or "Do Not Enter."

It did spark the imagination, though, and make me think about how excited I would have been to have visited that place as a child. I loved caves from early childhood, and had books about caves. I had mental lists of the caves I wanted to visit, and dreamed of spelunking someday.  I was completely taken with the idea of these vast, dark spaces being carved out beneath our feet, and was in love with the photos of dripstone formations I saw in books.

The crevices at Devil's Den sort of reminded me of that childhood fascination. Made me wish I was a kid again and could spend the day roaming those rocks, living some complicated fantasy in my mind.

Grayson was not so taken with them. In fact, they creeped him out. The cool air coming out of the darkness sent him right back out into the light. I'd never get him into a truly wild cave, I think.  Maybe if I take him to a few commercial caves, he'll become less skittish.

I've only been in wild caves twice in my life.  Once when I was 16 and my mom and I visited Carlsbad, we took a little side trip to tour "New Cave," a wild cave up on a canyon wall not far from Carlsbad. It was a bit of a hike up the trail with the ranger, but the cave itself wasn't very challenging. There was just one area where we had to use a rope to help haul ourselves up over a slippery slope: an experience my mother has still not let me forget I put her through.

My next caving experience was much more of a contact sport. I had the privilege of going into a fairly large cave in northeast Oklahoma with Nick, a paleontologist friend of mine to look for bat fossils.  It was pretty wonderful.  I loved wearing the headlamp and exploring the tunnels. Nick showed me an old bear den, and took me into another part of the cave where there was a partial skeleton of a prehistoric cave bear, still lying where it had died some 10,000 years ago or more.  To get there, we had to pass through a very small crack for a good twenty feet or so.  The crack was so narrow that we had to crawl on our stomachs, sort of army-crawling / scrambling along as best we could. I had to clip my backpack to my shoe and drag it behind me, and in some places the ceiling was so low I had to turn my head to the side and squirm along blindly to get through.

I was pleased to get through this area without any notable sensation of panic or claustrophobia, but I wouldn't want to do it for much longer than we did. It was uncomfortable, for one thing, and I didn't like not knowing how far I'd have to keep going before I could get out.  I would certainly not want to enter a crack like that without knowing what was on the other side and being sure I could get upright again soon.

The bear skeleton was worth it, though. I had seen lots of fossils in the museum, of course. But I had never seen something still lying where it had lay for centuries. I imagine it's there still: lying in the damp and dark, with the minerals in the earth around it slowly transforming the bone to rock. It's an awesome feeling, difficult to describe.

All of that came back to me there in Devil's Den, as well as times I'd played among huge glacial boulders in an aspen grove in Colorado when I was six. There was that same sense of magic and mystery to the rock outcrops in Devil's Den:  a rocky bowl at the top of a hill called the Devil's Theatre, huge slabs of rock leaning against one another like an enormous stone house of cards or a tumbled Stonehenge. Awesome.

It's places like this that make me love my adopted home state. I'm enough of a prairie girl to always love the big skies and scrub forests of Oklahoma, but I find my true spiritual home amid forest, rocks and water. It always fills my heart with a great sense of wonder and peace, to walk among the trees. The forest has always been my church of choice, a sacred place for me. It's good to have it near me.