We haven't seen bears for a couple of days. We thought they were just taking a nap or something.
Turns out they seem to like the lower elevations. As we made our way down in a winding road to Crystal Cave, we saw this bear coming up the road.
It was taking a stroll probably looking for lunch.
There are bear warnings everywhere. When we parked by Crystal Cave, we put our cooler and bag of food in metal bear boxes. You really don't want to find your car in a mangled state when you get out of the cave, so it's best to follow rules cause the park rangers know what they're talking about.
The path to the cave.
Here's me back in 2008, hiking my way back up the Crystal Cave trail.
The cave entrance.
That's our guide, Alex, with the flashlight. He's a younger dude who knows so much about the cave. We learned a lot about the cave from him.
One of the cave formations that are thousands of years old. Beautiful isn't it? It looks like an ancient dragon waiting to wake from a spell.
Our path is illuminated by small lanterns, Alex's flashlight, and the occasional camera flash. Other than those, it's pretty dark. Here's one of the caverns.
One of the largest formations in the cave. If Alex said that a stalactite about a foot long hanging from the cave ceiling is about 500 years old, I wonder how old this big formation is????!
Look at the picture above and tell me if you can see an eye looking back at you. Creepy huh?
Stalactite formations from the ceiling inside this marble cave.
On the way out, we saw another bear crossing the road.
This one's bigger and fluffier. He was trying to move some branches out of the way of something and was kinda getting aggressive toward the branches, so we went on our way. So we saw two bears and a cave within a four hour span. Awesomeness!