Wednesday, October 28, 2020

The Caves of Maribel

Road trip opportunities have obviously been limited in 2020, but recently I was looking for an excuse to go visit one of my sons who lives on the eastern half of the state.  Bringing a big batch of cookies and other foodstuffs from his mom was almost enough justification....

But looking about for destinations I ran across a fun one.  Maribel Caves State Park.  Outdoors, easy to socially distance, and as upcoming posts will show, there was a lot of other interesting stuff in the area.  

Time to dive underground...

Several of the bigger caves were not open for tours, Covid and all, but there were a half dozen or so smaller caves you can crawl into.  

When we set out from the parking lot I was chatting away - it had been a while since we'd seen each other - and I forgot the handy little "cave light" that I always keep in the car.  So photo quality was variable as we used flash camera and phone light settings.  

Later I fetched the light which did make for better photos...although that annoying "white dot" problem that I've seen in brewery caves cropped up in this one.  It seems to be a combination of dust, flash setting and humidity.  If I'd remembered to carefully clean the lens of my indestructible travel camera I might have done a bit better.

Among other things my son had recently been online with a Dungeons and Dragons game that one of his friends runs.  So we rated each cave for how likely it was that orcs or other nasty creatures from the Tolkien world might be lurking in them.  As it happens we were better off without the brighter light.  Because when we re-explored one cave (Cooper Cave if you are planning a visit) we noticed that the brighter light revealed large numbers of very creepy spiders....and they were none too happy about it!

Shelob in Cheeseland....


 

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