Saturday, June 10, 2017

The Oregon Caves & the Chateau-June 5-6th

On Monday morning we drove the 3-1/2 hours from Crater Lake to the Oregon Caves.  The Oregon Caves are located in the very SW corner of Oregon, very close to the California State border in the Siskyou Mountain range.  The Chateau is the historic hotel built next to the Oregon Caves in 1934.  We planned to stay here the next two nights.  Night one, we stayed on the 3rd floor in a small suite in the back of the hotel.  It was ok.  My parents had to capture and release several room spiders onto the roof.  I am not a fan of sharing space with spiders.  Night 2-we moved to the rooms that you can see the windows of in this picture (left hand side, second floor-two larger windows with a little one in the middle.)
 
The Chateau had more of a rustic charm than the elegant charm of Crater Lake Lodge.
Next to the Chateau was the Chalet where the forest rangers and the cave interpretation center were located.  
 The Cave entrance is above the waterfall-we could see and hear this waterfall from our rooms.
There deer at the Oregon Caves were not afraid of us.  There is one at the top of the stairs.

 We did a lot of hiking here.  We climbed up to this view.
 The cave tour was really cool.  The Ranger told us a lot about caves in general.  The caves were made out of marble, which is baked limestone.  I saw a small brown bat too.  Here are some formations in the cave.
 There were a lot of snails and millipedes at the caves.
 My room in the Chateau.
 Mom, Dad and I went on a long hike to see a big tree, which is an old Douglas Fir.  We estimated 30 ft for the tree circumference.  It was a good hike, fortunately we did not run into any bears.