My first year in Vegas I went bungee jumping. An interesting experience, but not something I�d look forward to paying 50 bucks to do every year.
My second year I tried to go caving. I contacted Julia Bond, who got me in contact with Doug Billings from the Desert Dog Troglodyte Grotto. Doug knew of Desert Cave, just a few minutes outside Vegas, and gave me directions to go there. He wrote that the cave was trashed beyond belief, but anything unusual about a cave just makes me want to visit it more. It�d be solo caving, but I�d tell people where I was going and when I�d be back. I packed my caving helmet, flew to Vegas, got access to a rental car, and flat out forgot to bring the directions along with me.
This third year I contacted Julia for those same directions. Doug sent me directions again, along with a note saying he might also check it out, since he�d be in Vegas the same week as me. That smelled like a great opportunity for both of us to avoid solo caving, so we made plans to meet up.
I was staying at the Riviera, in the north end of the Las Vegas Strip. My convention was in the Las Vegas Convention Center, a mile or two away (but technically across the street, since each Vegas block is the size of Staten Island). Doug and I both had our conventions end early on Thursday, so we�d be meeting at the Riviera at 3:00, and taking his car to the cave.
The last speaker I had to cover at my conference ended at 2:40, and I ran out of there at 2:40:01. The Riviera was right in front of me, but it would take fifteen minutes to get there using the route I knew through the back of the hotel. I decided to take a short cut and get in through a side door. The entire side of the Riviera, however, has an unadvertised eight-foot barbed wire fence around it. I was stupid enough to figure I could scale a fence like that without being hurt, but I was wearing a suit, and I figured I wasn�t stealthy enough to do it without ripping the suit. So I ran around the perimeter, adding ten or fifteen minutes to my commute.
As I got to my room door, I heard the phone ring. I jabbed the keycard in the lock and got to the phone on the third ring. "It�s Doug, I�m down in the lobby." I said I�d meet him down there in five minutes, and quickly got into jeans and a Convention T-shirt.
I had packed a small amount of gear: a helmet, an old pair of jeans, kneepads and gloves. It was only a third of my carry on bag. But I was also bringing a full change of clothes, complete with a second pair of shoes, since I had no idea how dirty I�d be getting. My travel cave bag (a.k.a. a white garbage bag) was stuffed.
There are at least eight places in the Riviera that could be called �lobby�. There�s the underground entrance where the taxis pull up, the area by the escalator and elevator a story above that, the long registration desks, the ticket booth, and the thirty front doors of the casino. I patrolled back and forth across all of these, looking everyone in the eye for recognition. I was lugging a trash bag full of gear, so I figured I shouldn�t be too hard to spot.
My lobby searching lasted 45 minutes, with no Doug in sight. I wanted to check my messages in case Doug had any last minute change of plans, but getting to my room would be a ten-minute round trip. After 45 minutes, I figured it was the best use of time. Again, as I got to my door, I heard the phone ring.
Doug said he was in the convention area lobby. I remembered him saying that before, and me conveniently forgetting it from the first phone call. The convention area was away from my patrol route, but right underneath my room. I went down the elevators and found him immediately, also in an NSS shirt. I apologized, he said forget it, and that continued for several dialogue turns.
Doug�s Suburban was parked outside, with a "SEAN RYAN WAIT HERE" sign under the windshield wiper. I could actually have seen his car from my hotel window, if I bothered to look out it. He pointed the car north and left the Strip.
Within five minutes, all signs of casinos had disappeared, and turned to regular city streets. Within fifteen minutes, it was brand new housing developments. "None of this was here ten years ago," Doug said. Within twenty minutes, it was empty desert, real Road Runner territory.
Giant multicolored mountains loomed ahead of us. A red stripe ran through them: Red Rock. Red Rock is sandstone from 600 million years ago that worked its way to the surface. There�s also limestone in the mountains, which made cave formation easy. This was not a view you�d get tired of.
Doug�s grotto in California was contacted regularly by movie and TV production companies, he told me. Since the caves in that area are valuable commodities, he�ll only work with them if they push conservation. Most of them are just preliminary calls that never get followed up, so he doesn�t give too much thought to any one call.
The road we were on quickly became deserted, and there was barely a car on it when we pulled off by a horse ranch. We did a mild suiting up: I pulled kneepads over my jeans and checked my Petzl Zoom. The Zoom decided to stop working, despite fresh batteries. (I�m sure this is quite a shock to Petzl Zoom fans, if such people exist.) I borrowed a headlight from Doug, and we started walking.
Five minutes of horse poop hopping later, we found large hitching posts with two horses tied to it. Two honest-to-God cowboys were by a field. Ten-gallon hats, big belt buckles, shiny shirts. They were the entertainment for the horseback riding trip that was currently out in the canyon. Maybe we�d pass them by on our trip. Hey, they could give us a ride back to the car!
The cave was in a huge canyon. Walking through it was easy: just follow the horse trail, and avoid horse byproducts. House-sized boulders littered throughout the bottom showed evidence of flash floods. The canyon walls rose up steep, with very clear definitions of the geologic rock eras.
There were a couple other caves in this canyon, although Desert was easily the biggest. Doug pointed out Wounded Knee cave to me, which he said we could check out on the way back. It was only a couple hundred feet, he said. That�s about as big as caves come in New Jersey.
After a decent hike, Doug pointed out his method of finding Desert Cave, which is so foolproof any drunken spelunker can find it. If anyone is heading to Vegas and wants to find the cave, contact me. I�m not mentioning them here since any yokel could be reading this.
Doug said to take note of how we climbed up the canyon, since that was also how�d we�d climb down it, probably without daylight. We were within an hour or so of sunset.
Desert Cave was right where Doug remembered it, a small hole with what looked like a huge room inside. We gave a short unsuccessful search for Upper Desert Cave, a supposedly pristine cave relatively close to Desert Cave. Doug hadn�t seen it before, so it was five minutes of fruitless searching. The better it�s hid, the less chance it�ll have of being trashed, so it�s probably for the best that the two of us had no luck finding it.
The entrance room was a big hollow that at one point was gorgeous. Huge columns of stalagmites almost reached the ceiling, which was over ten feet at parts. Flowstone was everywhere you looked. You could blow through a roll of film and not shoot the same formation twice.
Of course, all of it was broken and covered in paint. Every formation that could be broken was broken. What were left were the thick solid rock bases that a sledgehammer wouldn�t be able to break. I couldn�t even find the broken tips of the formations: they had either been stolen, or smashed beyond recognition. The stalagmite bases had more spray paint on them than a delivery truck in a bad part of town.
Doug brought out his digital camera and some slave units for pictures of this big room. He got a couple of me, and I got a couple of him. There was still daylight coming in from the entrance, so a headlight wasn�t too crucial to line up these shots.
Some of the stalactites were still active. Small wet spots were on the floor, and corresponding drops of water hung onto the broken stumps on the ceiling. Give those guys a hundred thousand years, and this cave was back in business.
Doug said the worst damage was further inside, so we crawled through some cracks on the left. It went down to smaller and smaller cracks, hands and knees crawling at its biggest. There was plenty of garbage down here, but probably from bottles and cans that plinkoed their way down. The room we wanted was to the right, so I reversed out.
This was my first time in a non-Appalachian cave. The temperature was distinctly warmer than of caves in the northeast, and without any of the humidity. I could see the appeal of southwestern caves: their temperature and moisture weren�t all that different from an air-conditioned office. I had put a flannel over the T-shirt for the canyon hike: I forgot to take it off inside because there was so little of an atmosphere change. Dry rock protrusions were catching on all its buttons, as well as the pockets of my jeans.
The right led us to a second room, with a big column in a corner. I put a slave behind it, and Doug got some pictures. This room seemed to have ever more spray paint on it than the first room. I checked the cracks for broken formations, and could only find broken glass. I�d be happy to find a single soda straw.
Another crawl led us to a third, and still more trashed room. It had a wall that seemed to get a new layer of paint every year. Layers on top of layers of it, making even the freshest graffiti unreadable. The deeper we went, the worse it got. If there was a layer below this, it would have to involve a septic tank and a lawn sprinkler. Doug thought about the logistics of bringing a power washer in here and blasting all the paint off. I figured it�d be easier to get a couple gallons of beige paint. Either way, the first spray painters after us in here would get a clean canvas, and the cycle would begin again.
Pieces of charred wood were in this third room. "Can you imagine building a fire in here?" Doug asked. This was essentially a dead air cave: the smoke would just collect. Not to mention that every piece of wood would have to be hauled a few miles to get inside.
This third room had Doug's favorite piece of graffiti: "LESBEINS FROM HELL" with an arrow pointing down. I don't know if the lesbeins from hell live down there, or if the lesbeins are instructed to find hell in that direction. I wasn�t positive on the painter�s spelling, either. Maybe he were remembering that grammar phrase "I before E, except after C, except as in weigh, or if people are gay."
Down among the lesbeins from hell, in something too small to be considered a fourth room, was a six-inch high crack with formations. I finally saw my unbroken soda straw. It was in a little wedge, where only the smallest of hammers would fit it. Appropriately, there was a 7-Up bottle wedged next to it. I also found broken soda straws. Outside the white exteriors they�re all crystalline.
Doug told me about some beer-toting spelunkers he ran into when leaving a previous Desert Cave trip. They asked if he knew where �the party cave� was. Doug wasn�t alone on this trip; among his group was with a biologist who drove a truck from his work. They concocted a story about a viral outbreak in the cave, histoplastmosis and Hantavirus and several other scary sounding words. The guys in the group weren�t entirely scared off, but the girls in the group sure were, and what point would it be for the guys to go in without the girls? Someone else in Doug�s group was with the sheriff�s department, so he flashed his badge to further the authenticity. These western cavers get plenty creative in the name of conservation.
We backtracked and came out with the last bit of daylight. We had been in Desert cave an hour. It was just enough so we could climb back down to the canyon without our lights. We were probably much better off than the average Desert Cave return party, with a flashlight in one hand and a bong in the other.
Doug hooked a left when we passed by Wounded Knee cave. He just wanted to take a pop inside. I was more than happy to oblige: a pop-in is as good as seeing the whole cave as far as my anal cave checklist is concerned. I went in first, crawling only ten or fifteen feet before being forced to stop. "There�s a gate."
"What?"
"A big gate. Five horizontal bars." It looked just like the gate at Sinnett-Thorn. Why would anyone bother busting this open, when they had a bigger gateless cave right up the trail? This cave had some hope for preservation. Doug quickly scrambled inside; anything that would prevent another Desert Cave was good news.
A plaque by the gate explained that several species of bat lived here, including one rare species. It was closed April 15 to September 15, the opposite of northeast bat hibernaculum closings. As if to show the bat population, one big fellow was hanging off the ceiling in the foyer the gate had made. He was dark brown and the size of a mouse, about twice that of the classic little brown bat. I guess he couldn�t read well enough to get to the safe side of the gate.
When we got out, the sun had just about set. Our headlights came in handy for playing hopscotch around the horse poop. We passed by the cowboys, one of whom had a guitar and was singing to a couple dozen tourists. The hitching posts were packed with horses.
It was just about dark when we got back to the car. The wind was picking up, blowing surprisingly little sand and grit into our eyes. The wind is a regular occurrence, so most everything loose has already been blown away. I only had a little bit of dust on my shirt and jeans: not even enough to bother changing. (Doug�s car had leather seats.)
Coming back home, I surveyed my damages. The dry desert air gave me dry desert skin, to the dry desert glove rubbing against my dry desert wrist gave me a dry desert bruise. If anything in that equation had any moisture to it, my wrist wouldn't have looked like a squirrel was gnawing at it. What was really surprising was that one of my kneepads were wet. I didn�t crawl through any water, and if it came from sweat then both of them should have been damp. Maybe it was water from previous cave trip to Clarksville that never dried out.
I�ve now been in more caves in Nevada (2) than in New Jersey (1, Leigh).
I highly recommend the cave to anyone visiting Vegas. It�s not too far out of the way, it�s easy to find for first timers, and you can get an understanding of why west coast cavers guard their caves like mother bears. If you have a few days to kill, bring a box of garbage bags and be prepared to haul them out full.