It’s worth it! Go ahead - you’ll love it.If you’re looking for the perfect multi-day tour, tailored for small groups, there is no better option than this circle trip.īeginning from Iceland’s charming capital city, Reykjavík, you will tackle the Golden Circle sightseeing route, the stunning South Coast, and the elusive Eastfjords, before experiencing all that the beautiful north and western regions have to offer. Good, sturdy footwear is important.īring a flashlight or two with extra batteries. The trail length is 1100 feet, including 370 stairs, and there is a 250 foot elevation gain. Take a daypack with your extra layers of clothing. You might get warm while walking up the steps, and it is going to be chilly (40 degrees), damp, and possibly muddy in the cave. Leave extra time in your day to stop at Beaver Falls Karst Trail.īoaters and float plane pilots will find the dock in the northern portion of El Capitan Passage, slightly to the west of the north-south stretch of the passage. Turn onto FSR 15 and the parking lot for the cave is at 1.6 mile. There is good signage four miles prior to the turnoff and then at the turnoff to direct you. The tour takes approximately 2 hours.Įl Capitan Cave is located on the Forest Service Road 20 and is an approximately two hour drive from Craig or Thorne Bay. There are three tours in a day (but not every day of the week) at 9a.m., noon, 2:30p.m. Normal operating months are from May to September. No babies in carriers or backpacks.ĭates and days of the week vary from year to year. #Everlasting summer guide cave freeThe strange, tall, and dripping passages of El Capitan Cave await the adventurous soul.Ĭall at least two days in advance to set up your free tour. If you find yourself exploring Prince of Wales Island, be sure to enter its underworld. They are tales of ancient reefs, tortured rock, great floods, pre-historic creatures, and torch-bearing ancestors. The sculpted hallways of this blueish-gray cave tell stories older than history itself. El Capitan Cave is perfectly at home amongst dancing muskeg hemlocks, prancing Sitka black-tailed deer, and bears that move like living shadows. Prince of Wales is big for an island, exotic for the United States, strangely dreamy… and yet somehow familiar. It is shaped by the melting of glaciers, the rise and fall of the sea, centuries of ceaseless dripping, and floods both ancient and new. It does not belong to us- it belongs to the ages. El Capitan Cave exists on a timescale far greater than that of its human visitors. We are destined to be eternal wanderers perpetual visitors to these grand limestone halls. There is no food to feed our hungry bellies, no light for our curious eyes, and no fuel for friendly campfires. It is too cold, wet, and dark for us to stay. In a modern world tailored to our human needs, we find in this Alaskan cave a place truly not meant for us. One often feels a sense of primal uneasiness as their breath floats past the beam of a headlamp. The cold quietness is disturbed only by the voices of visitors the eternal blackness broken only by our electrically powered lights. The fleeting and transient weather of the outside world shifts into the ancient sameness of the subterranean. Sunlight fades into everlasting darkness dappled Devil’s Club shade replaced by beams from battery-powered lights. Ocean breezes are lost to damp, humid air smells of the forest forgotten amid the scent of earth and rock. Wherever these grottos may be, the fact is that of the thousands of caves pockmarking this landscape, most are difficult- if not impossible- to reach.Īs one pushes further into the bowels of the cave, the temperature steadily falls towards 40˚F (4.5 degrees Celsius). Others require the help of boats, all terrain vehicles, GPS devices, and technical climbing gear to access. Some pits and caves are a mere dozen feet from major roads, hidden in plain sight behind drooping cedar boughs, prickly Devil’s Club shrubs, and lazily hung green mosses. Many of POW’s skyscraper-deep pits, underground rivers, and hidden paleontology sites are located high up in the alpine, accessible only by helicopter. It was this geological and ecological setting that made El Capitan Cave look so alien to me. These factors come together for the perfect cave storm, and the high latitude adds a unique twist to the formation and aesthetic quality of Tongass caves. The high density of caves is due to a combination of heavy rainfall, faults and fractures within the bedrock, unusually pure limestone, and acidic run-off from northern bogs called muskegs. Prince of Wales Island is home to thousands of limestone and marble caves, each one a unique glimpse into a geologic underworld.
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