Birthday and a Trip to a Utah Cave

It has been a long day, but I thought I would do a post about a couple of occurrences during the last couple of days. Yesterday was my birthday, and I was surprised about how many people remembered it, especially people at my work. My brother took me to lunch with his two children and we had a great time eating lunch at the BYU Cannon Center. I remember feeling very happy as I walked back to work after eating lunch. I was also glad that I was able to get lots of things accomplished at work that day despite it being my birthday.

Today, we went on a trip to Antelope Springs Cave, which is located about 40 miles northwest of Delta, UT. My friend from work has been to this cave several times. That cave was really something. It was a typical Utah west desert cave and required lots of crawling, climbing, and rappelling.

Antelope Springs Cave sign post

The entrance to the cave was through a small hole in a gate encasing the entrance to the cave. Upon entering this hole, we climbed along the side of a wall a distance of about 30 feet until we reached the bottom of the entrance area. From there, we headed straight into the cave. We crawled on our bellies to get through several of the rock-lined passageways. After several crawls, walks, slides, and climbs, we arrived at the farthest point from the entrance to the cave on our trip: the “Soda Straw Room”. This was a room full of stalactites and soda straw type formations hanging from the ceiling.

The Antelope Springs Cave "Soda Straw" room

From the soda straw room, we were going to do a large loop in the cavern, but as we headed down to the location of the supposed loop, we could not locate it…it was as if the entrance to the loop had caved in and was plugged up by large rocks. But we found a little crawl space from this location to the room at the bottom of the entrance to the cave, so we all crawled through this small crevice in a rock.

We ended up exploring many parts of the cave, but at the end of the day, after looking at a map, we realized that we had left many parts of the cave unexplored. There were many beautiful parts of the cave, including the many stalactites and stalagmites. Many of these features had “died” from people breaking them and touching them as they pass through the cavern’s tight spaces.

Our group in the cave

Upon exiting the cave, I arrived at my car and noticed my rear passenger tire was flat. So the guys in the group helped me replace the tire with the spare located in the back of my car. After replacing the tire, some guys and one of the girls shot a .22 pistol at a target they had set up. Even the spare was a little low on air pressure, so we took it easy as we headed the 50 or so miles back to Delta. There, I had my first experience patching a car tire since we could not find a tire store that was open on Saturdays. That was really a lot of work as we pulled the tire off the wheel, applied glue and a patch to the hole, replaced the tire on the wheel rim, and reattached the tire to the car. After 2 or so hours, we had the tire fixed and back on the car. Thanks for your help, Eric! I think I’ll continue going to tire stores and have them fix my flat tires, though. Luckily, Eric had a shop full of air and hydraulic power tools!

The spare tire on the back of my car and shooting guns

We had dinner at the local Delta burger shop and cruised on back to Provo/Orem, where I came home, cleaned up and took a shower, did my laundry, and wrote this little thing about the trip. It was quite an adventure!