After the Carson City Wine Walk on Saturday, I drove up to Lassen Volcanic National Park to camp at the Butte Lake area for the weekend, hoping to get a couple of trails in on Sunday. The camping was uneventful, except for a nice light show generously provided by an encroaching thunderstorm. I awoke early Sunday morning, broke camp and made my way toward my first stop - Subway Cave.
While I had made a brief stop here a few years ago with my friend Nick, I didn't have the opportunity or equipment to take many pictures. I decided to fix that this time. The cave itself is technically just outside the park's borders and just a hundred or so yards east of the junction of highways 44 and 89. I parked and made my way into the blackness. The cave has always fascinated me with it's size and relatively smooth walls, but as I understand it, this is fairly typical of a lava tube cave, which this is. The darkness, however, is complete. As the entrances to the cave get lost around corners, the light fades into non-existence and the visitor is left with nothing but true blackness. Thankfully, this time I brought a head-lamp. The cave tour itself is only a few hundred yards, but towards the end, I am taken by an area of cave in, where it seems part of the ceiling collapsed into a pile of rubble on the cave floor. I snap a few shots and make my way back to the jeep.
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