Empire Cave Trip Report
by Ethan Wilkins age 6 ½, Ali Hoffman age 5 11/12, Rogan Kriedt age 6 ½, Zoe Novic age 5 ½, Dylan Ornas age 6, Ari Sidfield age 10 ½, and Jorden Sidfield age 7 with some help from Lysa De Thomas age 34 7/12

We went to Empire Cave. It is a very very big cave with a really long ladder. We had to wear helmets on our heads with chin straps. Dillon had to wear one of Lysa's helmets because his did not have a chin strap. We also had to bring three flashlights. That's because you can drop one, or the battery can die, or the bulb can burn out, or lots of things.

We took a picture before we went into the cave. Then we went down the ladder. Ali was the first kid to go down the ladder. She wasn't afraid, not even a teensie little bit because she did it last year. Everyone went down the ladder one at a time, and you had to say, "ON Ladder" and "OFF Ladder", and "ROCK" if you dropped something. And you don't look up if you hear the word rock, because you might get the rock in your face. And you don't go on the ladder together because you don't want to fall like dominoes if one person falls.

It was really fun and interesting in the cave. First Lysa told us a story about a little boy who was afraid of the dark, but learned that it was only his imagination. Then we saw a spider that only lives in the caves in Santa Cruz. And we saw lots of moths.

In the very big part of the cave we saw two big stalagtites. They looked like waterfalls. To get to the back of the cave we had to crawl. There was paint on the walls and some of us tried to rub dirt on it to cover it up.

In the very back of the cave we found lots of mud or clay statues. Then we each got a pretty rock from Lysa's pack and put it somewhere in the room. Then we turned off all are lights, and stayed quiet for very very long time (35 seconds).

When we turned on the lights the rocks were shining and the cave was very pretty, but then we put the rocks back in Lysa's pack and the room looked ugly. We learned never to take rocks out of caves, or to break the things off the walls. It makes the cave ugly that way.

On the way out we could go down a very crawly passage if we wanted to. It was very muddy. Ethan, Dylan, Lesley, Barak, Ari and Lysa went down it. Barak and Lysa got the muddiest.

We took a picture of all of us all as we were very dirty when we got out of the cave.

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