A late flight into Palm Springs was followed by an even later drive. The desert was alive with foxes, coyotes, kangaroo rats, bunnies, and other wildlife using the night. Without incident I made it out to Agua Caliente County Park and Heather and Claire's campsite. The morning started heating up fast and we drove the sandy washes out to nearby Arroyo Tapiado, home of California's best collection of mud caves formed out of the expansive clay badlands. We almost arbitrarily crawled into one of the caves but instead opted to do a loop hike, something I have never had a chance to do out here. We went up the so called Chasm Cave, spacious with easy walking for most of its length and some nice sweeping meanders. In a few places there were skylights temporarily breaking up the subterranean. Fortunately above the cave there were still several deep alcove corners, allowing us to stay mostly out of the sun during the hike.
After many twists and turns we spotted the subtle entrance of the tributary E-Ticket Cave entering on the left, which was to be our route up the the badland plateau above. Now we got dusty as this complex cave forced us to climb, crawl, and squeeze through multiple levels of meanders. Sometimes low was easiest, other times going up and over was best. We mostly intuited the easiest way but this became quite the adventure compared to the spacious cave earlier. Progress was slow but eventually we made it back into the sunlight, thoroughly coated in white dust. It took us about 20 minutes to go about 250 feet, but it felt longer both in time and distance.
We bypassed some deep infeeder sinkholes and picked our way across the bright badlands, following the rock units to the southeast. The saddle area had abundances of gypsum, glinting in the sun like broken glass. Before long we started heading down the next wash as the walls built and intermittent caves started to show.
The first significant cave was Skylight Cave, which threw a couple downclimbing challenges at us but had some nice light and some nice natural bridges overhead (frontispiece). We raced through the sunny section between caves, eager to dive back into the cool darkness.
The last cave, Carey's Cave, was particularly impressive with the largest passageways of any of the mud caves I have seen here. We spotted about fifty bats roosting on the ceiling just inside the cave's top entrance and saw them periodically dart overhead the rest of the way through. This cave had some really impressive sweeping meanders and a tall roof that must have approached 40 feet high in places. Altogether it was a pleasant stroll and a good way to round off our loop (I'm glad we went the direction we did). Carey's Cave ended quite abruptly at a particularly non-descript hole, then we walked Arroyo Tapiado the short 0.3 miles back to the car.
I hung around for some swimming and relaxing, having a chance to take a dip in each of the three pools before driving back home. Thanks to Heather and Claire for letting me crash their girl's weekend. It was nice to have a little kidventure.
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