Yesterday Benworth and my friends Becca, Clint, Derek, and I went to Peppersauce Cave in Oracle, AZ. Before embarking on this trip, I had never even heard of Oracle, (let alone Peppersauce Cave), but both Benworth and Clint said they had been there multiple times, so we camped out near the cave Friday night, and headed in at about 9:30 Saturday morning.
I had never been in a cave before, so I was pretty excited! There's about a mile of passages you can go through, but only half is shown on the official map outside the entrance. There's one big room that has a few passages leading off it (including one that leads to a lake), but the one we followed (after taking a slippery, muddy ladder down) was called the Rabbit Hole, named because of the size and the necessity to go through head first. It was pretty dusty for the most part, which was nicer than a ton of mud, which Clint said is how the cave usually is. About two-thirds of the way through, I started feeling a little dizzy and kind of shaky, and I sat down for a little bit while the rest went through a particularly tight tunnel to explore a little more. The passage eventually looped back to where I was, so we continued down another path until I started having trouble breathing (I'm guessing a combination of heat + dust), and I had to pause again.
We eventually made it to the Signing Room, which is pretty much the endpoint of the passage, and signed one of the many little notebooks in the room. We took a longer break here to eat some snacks and talk, including to turn off all our lights to try and scare each other with stories.
What was weirdest about being inside the caves was when we turned off all the lights and let it just be pitch-black...even with absolutely no light source, my eyes still had these kind of gray images of where I thought the walls had been, and where different rocks were, but the shapes were only there when I had my eyes open. I think my brain was just completely weirded out by the fact that I couldn't see a
nything...usually in the dark your eyes adjust and you can see some things, right, but in this instance it was just so completely dark my brain was trying to create images anyway. Or maybe that was just the heat exhaustion talking.
Anyway, we made it back out (roughly five hours later), had a quick lunch, and headed home.
I'm super sore today, and despite getting a little sick in the middle of it, I had an awesome time!
