The R.A.N III Experience

Timpanogos Caves

On Sunday Ray and I went to American Fork Canyon which is the home of Timpanogos Cave. I have wanted to check this out for some time now as I hear it is pretty awesome. Even better is that we went on a day where all the fees were waived! Normally, you have to pay to get into American Fork Canyon, it’s $6 for a 3 day pass and then you have to pay $7/person for the cave tour, not that expensive but it was nice to not have to pay at all! We arrived at about 3:40 PM and by about 4 we were starting the 1.5 mile hike up the mountain (which gains 1100 feet quickly thus making this a somewhat tough hike). The trail is also paved which I guess is nice for some people but it’s horrible on your shins let me tell you. It took about 45 minutes to complete the 1.5 mile trek up the mountain, not too bad considering the elevation change. We reached the top at about 4:45 PM, our cave tour wasn’t supposed to start until 5:20, luckily, there was room in the group going in before us so we didn’t have to wait.

We entered the door to the cave (yes, a door on a cave – since the caves were made a national monument in the early 1900′s you can no longer go in without a ranger guide) and were shuffled into a dark room with a bat on the ceiling. At this point the ranger came in and gave us the brief lowdown on what was about to go down. Essentially, we would go through all three caves, yes there are three: Hanson, Middle, and Timpanogos cave. I’m not going to go through play by play and tell you about every detail of the caves because that would be boring and my photo album of this adventure does a much better job telling the story than I can. I will tell you that this was seriously awesome! The caves were so cool (literally and figuratively – 45 degree temp). There is also a once a day trek into the caves to go to an underground lake, which unfortuantely we didn’t get to do but I would like to. Also, this was my first time in American Fork Canyon and it’s pretty sweet, I think I may consider this a future camping location. Anyway, check out the photo album here of this sweet trip!

On a side note, I am going camping in a few weeks (the weekend after my birthday) up in Heber where I went with Bobbi and Matt over July 4th weekend, this makes me very happy.