Awesome looking moth
Outside of the California Mammoth Cavern...it was found when a guy was shooting targets when he noticed that the targets would waver. He discovered air blowing out of a hole in the ground...
Used the external flash with this one...it's actually pretty dark...very Indiana Jones ride-like.
The bottom levels of the caves were flooded when we went...during the summer, tours can actually go into them. Guess you can't tell where the water starts since it's so clear...well it's pretty much the dark green section.
One of the largest rooms in the cavern.
People started carved their initials in the rock in the 1850s. Look! Chinese characters...
Look at all those names...
I'm not sure if this is a naturally occurring hole but apparently one of the tours goes through there...
Emily demonstrates just how small that hole is...it's too bad i didn't use the external flash for these...that black shadow you see at the bottom wouldn't happen if I'd used it.
A naturally occurring sound board. You'd thump it and get a good vibration tone out of it.
This is at the top of Moaning Cavern...it's so big that it could fit the whole Statue of LIberty! This cavern is especially cool because they allow people to rappel from the top to almost the very bottom. It's a good 100+ ft.
You can't see it but there's a little room at the bottom of this stage...where you move over to the real hole which drops 200 ft down. The Statue of Liberty is 151 ft from feet to torch. Yeah freaky I know. My heart did stop when I saw just how long of a drop it was. Placing my feet through the hole and letting go of the walls was pretty tough.
Those ladders are not to scale.
"In this part of the cave scientific excavations have revealed the remains of more than 100 humans bodies. About 13,000 years ago, the prehistoric men fell or were thrown into the blackness of this huge cavern. The bones, preserved to present time by the deposits of mineral-bearing waters, are the oldest human remains yet found in America." from www.showcaves.com/english/usa/showcaves/Moaning.html
The New Don Pedro Reservoir...we saw this place on the way to Yosemite. That's the James E Roberts Memorial Bridge. The Reservoir is the 5th largest artificial lake in California.
