Then I found out that the Dalai Lama has described Castle Hill as a "spiritual center of the universe." My fate was sealed...I had to find this place.
So, the day before semester break began, Cara and I went up to Castle Hill to search for the cave...it turned out not to be so hard to find, only taking us one wrong turn and about 20 min to discover. Grabbing our headlamps on the way out of the car, we scrambled down a hill, and were quickly granted our first siting of what lay ahead. The entrance to the cave (actually the exit point of the stream):
Just inside the cave:
After standing in awe of this massive hole in the ground and the crystal clear (and cold!) water trickling out of it for a few minutes, I started to venture in. I quickly ran out of rock to stand on, and began wading through the water. Ankle deep became chest deep in a matter of seconds, the shock nearly taking my breath away. I turned around laughing, and Cara's face was one of shock. She wasn't too sure about continuing into the cave if it was that deep already, but I eventually persuaded her to come in. Teeth chattering a little bit, we started wading up stream, and luckily for us it quickly subsided back to about mid-calf deep. With nothing but darkness ahead, I paused to look back towards from where we came:
This cave is indescribable. The stream winds its way through limestone mini-caverns, over little drops (the biggest one by the exit was about 1.5m tall), and was joined midway by trickle of a waterfall:
The stream has gradually carved pockets and ridges and a myriad of unnameable formations in the limestone, here are a few:
I was going first and Cara second through most of the journey. Talking afterwards, we confessed that we both had worst-case "what-if" scenarios running through our minds the whole time. She was afraid one of us would get hurt (sprain an ankle, etc), while I struggled to control visions of walls of water rushing around a bend in the stream and overtaking us. That's one of the crazy things about caving...the dark combined with the one entrance, one exit thing makes your imagination run wild. All of our fears were just that though...imagined. It would take a torrential downpour for the cave to flood and if one of us were to get hurt, the cave is not actually that long...it only took us an hour or so to travel the length.I could sit in front of my computer for literally days and try to make up words to describe this whole experience...the cold water that eventually felt soft because my legs were numb, the crazy rock formations, the two or three random bright red rocks, the eel I saw in one of the pools, the 'stars' on the ceiling that were actually just tiny droplets of water, stopping and turning our lights off to sit in the total darkness halfway through, Cara reaching out to touch me to make sure I was still there, seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, having Cara close her eyes before leading her around the corner and asking her to open her eyes and see the light, standing in the last final pool in total awe before climbing the ladder out, reaching the top of the ladder and shimming our way across a narrow ledge looking down into the pool from which we came:
But instead I'm simply Speechless.
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