Our third stop was in northeastern California at the Lava Beds National Monument. Last year, the boys were especially enthralled with the idea of volcanic bombs, or lava bombs – molten rock that was catapulted into the air during an eruption. It was so neat for them to walk through fields of these igneous rocks scattered kilometers from the cone. It was what we had learned in school but in real life!! Lava beds National Monument covers an area of over 46, 000 acres and has 500 known lava tubes and caves running through the area. As it was really hot, and the kids were especially excited to explore some of the caves after hiking through the above-ground lava fields.
Mushpot Cave
Mushpot Cave lies directly behind the visitor center and is the only cave lit up for unprepared explorers to enter without needing gear for safe exploration. (If you do forget your headlamps and flashlights, or need to purchase hard hats, knee pads, or refreshments – all of these can be found at the visitor center.) Mushpot is a great starting point as it has educational plaques all throughout teaching about the different parts and formations of the caves and lava tubes.
Cave Loop is a driveable loop that allows access to 13 caves in close proximity without having to hike out to them. As well, there are 5 other caves outside the loop that neighbor the visitor center, so if you only have a half day to spend at Lava Beds and want to do some caving, it’s really accessible. The visitor center has Rangers that will go over Safety tips and give you a caving permit so that you can enjoy the caves safely and responsibly. When we went, the visitor center was closed for the first few days so we made sure to go over all the information here before entering the caves.
The landscape was eerily beautiful at Lava Beds. Tall yellow grasses and tumbleweeds spotted sparsely with wildflowers and indiscriminate flashes of green. Most everything above the knee is black due to the wildfire in 2021. It’s horribly poetic to walk through a landscape dotted with lava rocks at the base of a dormant volcano surrounded by blacked trees.
Symbol Bridge Trail
The most meaningful part of our time at Lava Beds for me was hiking out to Symbol Bridge. Just shy of 2 miles return (2.6km), the Symbol Bridge trail leads out through a winding wilderness of collapsed lava tubes and partially obscured caves. At the end, there is a collapsed tube that reveals the entrance to Symbol Bridge cave, a reverent place used by the Indigenous People in the area as a location for vision quests as well as spiritual ceremonies and journeys. The collapsed portion of the cave allows visitors, such as ourselves, to wander down into the depths and observe carved petroglyphs and painted pictographs remaining on the cave walls, from artists who left those marks thousands of years ago.
Though we don’t exactly know what they mean, they are meaningful. Perhaps their elusivity gives us the gift of being able to distill translation through our own lenses, and thus be drawn in, relating to the art itself. We look at a geometric pictograph resembling a sun and can narrate the symbolism of light, its importance to us in revelation, truth, and spiritual significance and believe that we are not much different than those cave guests, visiting generations before our time. I also connect with the precedence of leaving a mark, a sign. A manifestation of, not only existence, but the value of the journey. I imagine an inner ancestral monologue proclaiming; “I came. I was. I did something important and meaningful here, and thus lies my mark.”
Wandering in these caves and collapsed tubes makes one feel small and vulnerable, yet at the same time opens another door to feeling adventurous, and daring. At no time in my regular life did I wander into dark holes in the earth with my children in tow looking for ancient drawings! There is a sense of being where we shouldn’t be. Though we have been granted access by the National Park Service of America, these are sacred and also dangerous places. They are sleeping volcanoes bearing ancestral secrets.
So we left no mark of having visited. We made our joyful, hot and dusty; and sometimes cold and dark, discoveries, and felt grateful.
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