Peppersauce Cave

Lia and I went spelunking!
It is a fairly good size cave on the side of Mt. Lemmon near Oracle, Arizona.

We started off the day by dropping Aunt Sandy and Uncle David off at the airport for their week and a half long trip to Morocco. After swinging through the airport, we headed south to the cave that Lia and her brother, Jake, had heard/read about and visited a few months ago. We may have gotten waylaid a bit by a cute little cafe that promised hot coffee and good breakfast (and as Oracle is a pretty small town we ended up their for lunch as well). But we finally made it up the windy gravel road to the spot where you can pull off for the cave. There is no parking lot for the cave, but there is a spot where you can fit a car or two on the side of the road.

So we walked the quarter mile to the cave and strapped on our head lamps. The cave has multiple rooms, so I was a little worried about getting lost... until I noticed that someone had spray painted arrows that pointed to the exit at all times. That made it pretty easy and then we didn't have to worry where in the cave we went, we would always have a way out. The amount of other graffiti throughout the cave on the other hand was pretty disappointing. Some people have no respect for nature or its beauty.

I was surprised by how large the cave was. We did some research after we went and found out that all in all there is about  1 mile of mapped passageways in the cave. We were in the cave for about 2 hours and we think we explored most of it, but we know we didn't hit all of it because there were a few passageways that were too hard/dangerous/slippery for us to go down.

Lia said that the cave was more wet when she and Jake went, which was fortunate for us because we got to explore a little more and not get quite as muddy. There is a lake inside of the cave, and Lia was a little disappointed that it was lower than it was when she was previously there. It was still VERY cool. Nobody knows how deep and long the lake is or how many rooms of the cave it engulfs because no one has been diving in it. Apparently a couple years ago some cave divers went in, but never got to explore the pool because something was wrong with their equipment.

The lake was my favorite part no doubt, but the whole thing was a lot of fun to explore. I've never really been in a cave before, and when you turn out the lights inside the cave you really cannot see a thing. You can hold your palm to the tip of your nose and still not see it at all.

We had a lot of fun.
I didn't take any pictures because I left my phone in the car. I didn't want it to get muddy or fall out of my pocket as there were many instances where we were crawling or squeezing through entrances.