Almost time for this guy to be hibernating somewhere higher than under our deck.  It’s been four days now and he/she is still hanging out.  It should be a deterrent for the homeless guys in the park coming our direction.

On the recreation/adventure front I can now add spelunking to the list of things I’ve tried and probably won’t do too much more.  The one thing I was instantly reminded of was that caves, like mines, are always about 58° inside which was definitely warmer than it was outside.  I didn’t even know we had caves around this region, but I was reminded that caves can form anywhere there are large limestone formations and a source of water.  Bell’s Cave is only several hundred meters off off two roads that I travel often.  It’s known to the underground cognoscenti as a “sacrificial cave”, meaning it’s location is fairly common knowledge, it’s not too difficult and it’s a good place for newbies to visit.  All the interesting artifacts have been stolen or removed so there is nothing that the would be tampered with.  I now know there must be many more caves that only the “in crowd” visits because they don’t want the mystery and magic destroyed by the likes of guys like me.

Bell’s cave is plenty for a newbie, because there is lots of bouldering, shimmying, crawling and craggy formations to maneuver around.  Fortunately there was about 100 feet in a yellow surveyors line strung out showing which way to crawl, climb or drop.  I recon we only went a 150 yards or more, but it took us over an hour to go in and back out.  If I’d had the bike LED light I’d used for the Southern Tier ride that cave would have been much more interesting.  The LED headlamps were fine but only enough light to see where to put your hands and feet. This cave was well trampled and fortunately not wet at this time.