Wild Cave tour at Blanchard Springs Cavern Recreation Area, Ozarks near Fifty-Six, Arkansas

7/30/2019 - Wild Cave Spelunking, Blanchard Springs Caverns

GPS Coordinates:  (Latitude,  Longitude,  Elevation)
  Park for Cavern tours:  35.96392,  -92.17871  
  Park for Blanchard Springs:  35.95889,  -92.17539,  439 ft.
  Blanchard Springs:  35.95860,  -92.17740,  483 ft.
  Mirror Lake:  35.96349,  -92.17094,  416 ft.
  Gunner Pool:  35.99507   -92.21349,  461 ft.
  

Pet-Friendly: No dogs allowed in the cave.

Hiking Statistics:  For the first time in seven years, I have no idea.  There is no way to get a GPS track, so all I know is we were in the cave system for just over six hours.  Our guide said the Titan Room was about 0.6 miles from where we entered the cave, but between the ups, downs, overs, cutbacks, squeeze throughs, and corkscrews, it seemed like about a good eight mile bushwhack.  If I rate this as I do my other hikes, I would rate it as a difficult bushwhack based on the technical aspects.  I was so enthralled by what I saw and the ongoing conversation with our guide that I was never really fatigued.  I was still pretty jazzed at the end of the hike.

GPS files (.gpx format) - See maps at the bottom of this blog post

  GPS doesn't work in the cave, and you really don't need it for Blanchard Springs Falls or Mirror Lake; see the map below.

Links to blog posts for other nearby areas:

  Blanchard Springs Cavern Dripstone trail and area hiking
  Blanchard Springs Cavern Discovery trail, Mirror Lake, and Gunner Pool
  Mirror Lake night photography

Rick and Tom in the Titan Room.
The columns behind us are 85 feet high.

Everyone knows by now how much I love waterfalls, caves and night photography.  It should come as no surprise that the Blanchard Springs Recreation Area is one of my all-time favorite places, particularly in the summertime.  When other creeks and waterfalls dry up due to lack of rain, Blanchard Springs and Mirror Lake Falls are still in full splendor, fed by the seemingly endless supply of water in the large cavern systems underground here.  When it is too hot and humid to explore new hollows or even hike most trails, it is 58 degrees in the most beautiful cavern I have ever seen.  In the Milky Way season of April through September, the Milky Way is perfectly aligned with Mirror Lake and Mirror Lake Falls for some spectacular astrophotography in a dark sky area.  So when my brother Tom and his wife Jeannette came up to spend a few days with us, what better place to go this time of year for Bethany and me to show them some of the best Arkansas has to offer?

Blanchard Springs is about a 2.5-hour drive from our home north of Dover, but fortunately, we have good friends that have a nice cabin right on the White River only 8.9 miles from Blanchard Springs.  For those driving to Blanchard Springs for a day trip, getting there is still easy.  The turnoff to Blanchard Springs is right off Highway 14, so this is one of those rare hiking trips in which you can stay on the pavement for the entire drive.  The turnoff is well marked with a sign, 1.1 miles east of the small town of Fifty-six, Arkansas (see the map below).  After you make the turn, there are signs on the paved access road to the visitor center, Mirror Lake, and Blanchard Springs.  Blanchard Springs is operated by the Forest Service.  There is no fee for entrance to Blanchard Springs Recreation Area, but there is a small fee for the guided tours.

This curtain is formed by air currents less than 1/8 inch thick

The Dripstone and Discovery Tours are $12 each, with a 50% discount if you have a "Parks Pass" - the interagency pass also called a Senior Pass or Golden Passport.  If you don't have one and are over 62 years old, get one.  It is a one-time fee of $80 for a lifetime pass that will get you into all the national parks and other areas run by the federal government agencies.  The Wild Cave Tour is somewhat more expensive at $86 each but is a much longer tour with much fewer people and all equipment is provided for you.  The Dripstone and Discovery tours have just a $1 cancellation fee, but there is no refund on the Wild Cave tour.  If something does come up you can cancel your reservation, but they keep your money and you have one year to reschedule your tour.

You can schedule all of the tours and pay for them online, and that is advisable.  I was able to get reservations for the four of us on the Dripstone and Discovery tours, but the Wild Cave Tours were sold out.  They only have one tour a day on the days they actually schedule them, so there are not a lot of slots to start with.  When we went on the Dripstone tour yesterday, I inquired about whether there was a cancellation list, and as luck would have it, they just had a couple of cancellations for the Wild Cave Tour the next day.  Tom and I snapped up tickets for those two slots before someone could get them online.  Woo-hoo! Bethany and Jeannette had decided to opt-out of the Wild Cave tour anyway, but Tom and I were now set!

Near start of Wild Cave Tour

We arrived at the visitor center a few minutes before our 9:30am departure time and met Aaron, our guide for the day, and the other four guys that would be in our tour group.  There is a separate space in the visitor center just for staging the Wild Cave tours.  Aaron gave us what we would have called a pre-job brief at the nuclear facility I worked at.  He covered basically where we would be going, what the conditions were, hazards involved, safety measures, and contingencies for rescue if that were needed.  This tour is much more strenuous than the Dripstone and Discovery tours of the upper and lower cavern systems, and since there were no nice cement trails and handrails, there are quite a few more hazards.  Aaron laid out the conditions and hazards in plain terms, then gave us a chance to back out if it seemed to be more than we bargained for.  They don't discourage anyone from going, but they do want to be realistic so there are no surprises.  I'll just say this; if you aren't in decent physical shape or if you have some kind of limiting medical condition, this isn't for you.  To put that in perspective, I'm almost 67 and I had the time of my life, I really enjoyed it.  But I also get out and hike a lot; you should know your body, you decide for yourself.

A cave salamander, the largest animal living in the cave

After our briefing, we suited up and I leaned my first lesson on preps for this hike.  The only thing you need to bring is an extra pair of shoes to wear out (I took my water shoes), water, and a snack or light lunch to eat when you stop for a break half-way through.  They supply overalls, helmet, headlamp, knee pads, gloves, and a pack for the stuff you are taking in with you.  I'm not sure what the overalls are made of, but I think maybe kevlar or something equally as tough.  They are also a little heavy and airtight, so after trying it on, I opted to go shirtless and left my t-shirt at the staging room.  After seeing how active we were, I'm glad I did.  Even though it was 58 degrees, there were parts that I was active enough I still sweated.  I would have overheated with a t-shirt on as well.  

Speaking of stuff you take with you, DON'T take a good camera.  I left my Z7 back at the cabin and took only my cell phone for taking pictures.  A camera will get banged up pretty bad, there is no good place to pack it, and it will make it really tough to keep up and maneuver in some places.  Leave it in the car.  I put the cell phone in the only velcro pocket inside the coveralls, and put my snack food and two bottles of water in the pack Aaron provided.  I only needed one bottle of water, your mileage may vary.  The extra shoes you carry in for walking out of the cave after the tour can be any style.  However, DO wear a good pair of hiking boots for the tour.  You need good ankle support and good traction.  There is damp clay throughout much of the area you will be hiking, and it can get slippery even with good soles like my Oboz Bridgers have.  They were pretty gummed up with clay by the time we completed the tour.

We started the tour by getting on a bus from the staging area at the visitor center and riding around to the airlock that the Discovery tour uses to exit the cave.  Aaron gave us another briefing here, we put our gloves and knee pads on and went in through the airlock.  We actually used the lower cave trail, which is pretty nice, until we got through the "ghost room" (more on that later), and further down just past the huge waterfall-like flowstone where they have benches for the Discovery tour.  We left our extra pair of shoes off the trail here and started the actual Wild Cave tour.  It only takes a few minutes to get to this point, and from here on it is off the lighted trail and into areas of the cavern with no trail and only the headlamps on your helmet for lighting.

To be honest, we made so many turns down various passages, so many ascents, and descents, that I completely lost track of where we were in relation to the outside world.  Aaron is an extremely capable and experienced spelunker and very knowledgeable about the history of cave exploration here.  He kept up a continuous dialog about where we were, the geology of the cave, what kind of formations we were looking at, and historical points of interest.  For much of the route we took, there was a line run to act as an antenna for the radio he carried in the event we had some sort of emergency.  The cavern system here is roughly divided up into three sections; the lower cave that is where most of the Discovery tour goes, the upper cave, where the big Cathedral Room of the Dripstone tour is, and the middle cave, which you don't really get to see unless you go on this Wild Cave tour.  During the tour, we transitioned from one section to another, and Aaron often pointed out places where you could see a distinct transition between the huge limestone layers that each section of the cave formed in.  

At the "Death Ledge"

After dropping below a huge tube that carried the ancient underground river that drained to expose the cavern spaces, we ended up at a precipice Aaron called the "death ledge".  It's just a big cliff over a large pit that you don't want to fall to your death in, but for folks like me with a fear of heights, the name sounded a little ominous.  Here, we all turned off our headlamps for a couple of minutes to experience complete, total, darkness.  Yes, I stayed well back from the edge.  Here, Aaron also pointed out the flat ceiling over the abyss, and let us know that we would be taking a passage directly above that.  He mentioned that because the ceiling was so thin here, we would just be crossing it one at a time to prevent a collapse of the ceiling.  I made a mental note to let my brother Tom go ahead of me to properly test the structural integrity of the ceiling.

The Titan Room

Continuing on with the tour, we made numerous twists, turns, ups, and downs. Along the way, there were all kinds of cave formations that Aaron discussed with us, and the occasional dead bat that had been marked - some were identified over nine years ago and still weren't fully decomposed.  There were also a few locations where biologists had brought horse poop to catalog the cave life that would come out to feed on it.  Bat guano is the primary source of organic material for the cave crickets and cave spiders, and they are the primary source of food for the cave salamanders, the apex predator of the caverns.  Of course, the primary points of interest were all the various calcite cave formation, the "dressings" and "decorations" of the cavern; stalagmites, stalactites, curtains, columns, and flowstones.  There were also helictite formations, a speleothem (cave formed mineral) that appears bush-like or moss-like because it grows at all kinds of angles that seemingly defy gravity.  The helictites also grow on the sides of walls, not just the floor or ceiling, which makes their growth mechanism all the more mysterious.  There were a lot of helictites along our Wild Cave tour, something you rarely see on the Dripstone or Discovery tours.

We eventually made our way to the Titan Room, a large room with huge columns resembling Titan ballistic missiles.  We paused at a ledge here to eat lunch, rest, and take in the beauty of the cave.  It seemed to me that there was a whole lot of cave past the end of this room, and Aaron assured me there was.  He has been down into the Titan Room and has explored some of the passages further on.  New passages, huge rooms, and connections to other cave systems are still being found, but the National Forest Service has a policy of conservation and protection, not exploration, so very little exploration is done compared to Carlsbad or Mammoth caverns, which are operated by the National Park Service.  Blanchard Springs is the only cavern system operated by the National Forest Service.  

The guides on the Wild Cave tour are very experienced cavers that are trained to assess the capabilities of the people in each particular group and have bypass passages and different routes that can be used for folks that may struggle in a particular area.  They have places where they can take people, and places where they cannot take people (apparently the other end of the Titan Room is a  "not").  By this time, Aaron had assessed our small group as we utilized tenuous footholds, ledges, and slick areas, and had decided we were fit and competent enough to get "the works".  Oh my, what a fun adventure.  I'm used to climbing, hiking rough areas, and utilizing my skills as a champion "Ozark butt slider" on bushwhacks in wilderness areas, but this is different.  

At one point we had to pull ourselves up and use our hands and feet to brace on walls and "spider crawl" down about 30 or 40 yards of a passage, eight or ten feet above the passage floor.  If you have ever watched American Ninja Warrior on TV, this is similar to the "Jumping Spider" obstacle.  I loved it.  There was also a passage called "The Corkscrew" that you can probably envision, and at one point a choice of two narrow passages, one called "Ham Sandwich" and one called "The Birth Canal".  I had my pack hung sling-style on my side, and I still had to take it off to get through, then have it passed forward to me.

Small wooden placards with the names of Boy Scouts
on early exploration.  Good stewards of the cave,
they left these instead of damaging the cave wall.

On the way back, we passed points that we had seen earlier, but for the most part, took an entirely different route.  We passed a large room that bats packed into for a couple of weeks every October to do nothing but copulate.  Yeah, bats are mammals, not birds, and they "do it" kind of like people do, except hanging upside down.  I'm still on the fence as to whether I want to come back in October to see that, but I think it would be interesting.  We also saw some signs of the early cave explorers.  After the Cathedral Room and Ghost Room were discovered in the early 1960s, the Forest Service essentially shut down all cave exploration and concentrated on developing the elevators, tunnels, and trails to open the caves up to the public.  The caverns here are among the most highly decorated and best-preserved caverns in the world.  

Helictites

At the end of our off-trail adventure, we made one more descent down a slick clay surface where I basically put my boots together, squatted down, and skied to the bottom of the slope.  I think my form was pretty good.  To cap off our day, as we approached the area where the giant flowstone was on the Discovery tour, Aaron noticed the lights being turned on for an approaching tour group.  Knowing that part of the experience for the Discovery tour was to sit on the benches there and turn off all lights for that "complete and utter darkness" experience, he had us wait at the bottom of the large room there.  When the lights turned off, we screamed and yelled at the top of our lungs.  The next day, on the Discovery tour with Tom, our guides were talking to us about the Wild Cave tour, and when they found out we were on it the day before, said: "so YOU were the ones...".   No one cried or had a heart attack, so it was all good and added to the experience for those folks as well.

After getting back to where we left our extra shoes, we changed into them to get up on the lighted trail and carried our boots.  On the way out, Aaron gave us a really good tour and discussion of the best parts of the Discovery Tour, the giant flowstone and the Ghost room, a large room that is highly decorated like the Cathedral Room.  He also pointed out a small hole at the top of a clay mound, which is a recently discovered passage into a room as large as the Ghost Room, and as highly decorated with formations.  Aaron had obtained permission to take a couple of NFS employees into this room, called simply Ghost Room 2 after it had been charted and sampled by geologists and other scientists.  While in Ghost Room 2, he noticed yet another small hole that had airflow out of it.  Sticking his head and upper body into the opening, he found yet another large room about the same size with the same high level of fantastic formations.  This Ghost Room 3 is now waiting on proper sampling and charting before anyone is actually allowed into it, so as not to contaminate it beforehand.   

The Ghost Room

The point I am making with this is that there is probably much more of this cave system and many others waiting to be discovered.  One of the guides at Blanchard told me there are an estimated 10,000 caves in the Ozarks.  I believe it.  There are over 400 known ones just in Stone County where Blanchard Springs is, and who knows how many still unknown.   The Wild Cave tour is a great way to experience what it is like to get into a wild (unknown and uncharted) cave, with the benefit of going with a highly capable and competent guide to minimize the hazards.  I highly recommend this hike, with the caveat that it simply isn't for those not in decent physical condition or with medical conditions that might be prohibitive.  I can't believe we have lived in Arkansas for 28 years and this was the first time I took this tour.  It will certainly not be the last time.  

Blanchard Springs Recreation Area