Love is like a secret cave... :)

For our third anniversary, we were outdoorsy!  Having a December celebration can be challenging for most places in the northern hemisphere, but when we were getting married, we believed that it offered the opportunity to show a range of creativity.  There could be anything from snow escapades to tropical trips, restaurants to museums!  Living in wintry CA -- new for Brant and familiar for me -- means little snow and lots of rain.  Grass Valley has a 50/50 chance of being a white Christmas.  As we were enjoying time around my parents from the 19th to the 31st, we missed most of the precious snow and freezes back at our home's elevation.
Mom was the one who came up with the brilliant idea for our day, making a perfect sales pitch that we could not deny.  We were going to go spend the afternoon at Black Chasm.  Ooooo!  Located obscurely in the foothills around Jackson and Volcano in Amador County(I never heard of the town Volcano until we decided on the trip), Black Chasm is a rare vertical cavern with delicate, rarer-still helictite crystals.  Although the inside definitely is awe inducing, apparently it is also famous for inspiring the ever-so-unfortunate cave scenes' environment from the Matrix sequel.

 
This super-narrow entrance is right behind and beneath the Visitor Center.  The miner who had first discovered it in search for gold, dropped his original goal and made a living on tourism of the cave.  After he died, his scaffolding fell apart and others came vandalizing the first chamber, breaking/cutting off trinkets to take home.

You can see some of the damage to the left of this magnificent column, located at the first platform down.  To maneuver through the caverns, one walks single file down wooden stairs.  One's head nearly or does brush against mineral outcroppings quite a bit.  Thus it is not for any who cannot abide tight spaces.  It's very wet and drippy as one descends, but unlike the very chilly weather outside, it was about a balmy 60 something degrees.  Very pleasant.  There were three landing platforms before we reached the bottommost gallery, a subterranean lake just barely visible along the way.

 This coloration pattern is called cave bacon.

The big shelf bottom right (above) was the original cave floor, about 7-8 feet above our heads.  The image below is the top of the collapsed floor, about 4 feet below the last platform, as is the pic after.

 

 These white, twisty, primarily horizontal formations below are helictite crystals.  They are formed by super pressurized water droplets being squeezed through the rock so slowly that they calcify into these curly tubes.  They are super delicate and fragile to the touch.  They typically don't grow over a foot due to gravity.  However, the cave system sports one marvel at 14" -- the longest one currently known of.

 

After we finished our tour, we drove to a Strings restaurant in Jackson for dinner on our way back to my folks.  We began with an appetizer of artichoke dip and Ceasar salads.  Brant had a massive Calzone Milano (stuffed with chicken, broccoli, mushrooms, and Alfredo sauce) and I had Pasta Siena (shrimp and chicken, Penne pasta, dried tomato, pesto, and Alfredo-curry sauce).  When properly fattened, we went back out in the rain, driving cheerily through flood-warning-condition foothills to Woodbridge, to snuggle up again.  We watched "An Affair to Remember" and "Dave," and thus retired for the night.