STAYCATION: The Gardner Cave
By Adrian Barnes
A hot summer day and a’caving we did go. Okay, okay, I realize that a visit to the Gardner Cave with its sturdy metal staircases, electric flood lighting, and friendly tour guide can’t exactly be called ‘caving’ here in the oh-so-rugged West Kootenays. But still. It was a cave and we went in it. I stand by my choice of words.
We’d heard about the caves but never been. Google maps told me that the caves were a mere 33.3 kilometers from Rossland, just over the border in northern Washington. What could be easier and nicer on a broiling summer day than a quick twenty minute jaunt over the border for some free and environmentally-correct air conditioning? Or so I thought.
Before I realized google maps is...a dirty liar.
We drove down to the Waneta border crossing where the guard quizzed us on our destination. ‘Gardner Cave?’ he said, furrowing his rugged Mer’can brow. ‘You’re going to have to take some back roads to get there.’
Ah, back roads! we thought. The peaceful hum of rubber on asphalt, the quaint farmhouses and the stone-bored cows. Lovely.
We eased away from the border and turned on the GPS, setting our destination as Crawford State Park (where the caves are situated). A series of roads appeared: Boundary Road, Frisco Standard Road, Cedar Creek Road. Spot quiz: what do all these roads have in common? Answer: they’re all called ‘roads’.
Unfortunately, they aren’t roads, not really. Not in the ‘mellow country drive’ sense of the word. They’re rugged logging roads, carved through uncharted mountain lands. More Lord of the Rings than King of the Road.
As we drove on, the road ahead grew rougher and rougher and we began to climb higher and higher. The GPS now showed 68 kilometers to go. And our gas gauge showed less than a quarter tank.
Off went our environmentally-incorrect AC and in came the dusty, hot air.
I tried, as we bumped along, to use the GPS to determine how far Metaline Falls (the nearest town to the caves likely to have a gas station) was but for some reason our GPS, while it contains records of such Godless tracts of gravel and dirt as‘Frisco Standard Road’, contains no record of the town of Metaline Falls.
We knew the caves were an hour of rugged driving ahead, but we had no idea how much further the next gas station would be beyond that. Determined not to fail, I decided to press on while the wife fumed at my improvidence, gas-wise and my son retreated to the sanctuary of his iPod.
Not to keep you in suspense too long, but we finally made it, emerging from the woods onto a nicely-paved state highway right at the entrance to the park. By this time the empty light had been on for a while, but we made it to Metaline Falls, which was only about fifteen miles past the park, gassed up, and drove back to the caves, just in time for the last (free) tour of the day.
Our guide, Julia, was very friendly and professional, taking great pride in her knowledge of the cave and its history. The cave’s opening is a large hole in the ground surrounded by a metal picket fence. We entered it by clanging down a staircase into the cool, fresh depths of the underworld. It was 39 degrees US down there, which I think is about 3 degrees C (for Canadian). So bring a coat because the temperature shift from sweating to sweater is pretty dramatic.
The caves extend for over a thousand feet, but visitors are only allowed to explore about 500. The caves contain all the usual cave things: stalactites and stalagmites and a massive eight ton column that’s apparently the largest in the Pacific Northwest. There are also oddly shaped formations that resemble Christmas trees, frogs, alligators, and, amazingly...Richard Milhouse Nixon. Julia did a great job of pointing out all the relevant features and explaining the science of cave formation to us.
At about an hour long, it’s an interesting tour and the caves themselves have an interesting history. They were discovered around 1899 by Metaline bootlegger Ed Gardner. A local legend tells how, once, Garner was pursued by tax agents (bootlegging was legal at the time, but Gardner preferred not to pay taxes on the hootch he produced) and led them on a merry chase a couple of hundred feet past the caves, at which time he turned to face his pursuers and smiled. He was just over the Canadian border and beyond their jurisdiction. Later, legend also has it, he lost the land the caves are on to a local merchant called William Crawford--in a poker game. Crawford later donated the land to the state and got a park named after him.
Long a favourite site for locals tired of the heat, you can see where people have written their names on formations. Names of locals from as far back as the 1920s are preserved down there, slowly being covered by rock growth at the rate of something like a sixteenth of an inch every few centuries.
The tour over, we decided to return via the Nelway border crossing about 15 miles north of Metaline Falls. That route took us through Salmo on the way home. The travel time coming home was about the same as our journey in. There’s nothing wrong with the logging road route, as long as you’re gassed up and comfortable with the occasional dry creek bed running across the road. In our Toyota Matrix we were able to make it and only bottomed out twice.
Metaline Falls is also worth a stop, if only as an example of noble but dead dreams. A century ago, the young mining town (with a current population of just over 200) had some big plans. There are architecturally-interesting buildings there that look like part of a scheme to build a sizable city: an impressive brick playhouse and a very large and attractive apartment block testify to plans for a grid of wide streets filled with solid structures. That those dreams either died or never came to pass adds an air of poignancy as you drive around the now-quiet town.
We got home from our trip in the early evening and decided to round out our day with a screening of the spelunking-gone-terribly-wrong horror film The Descent. We were pleased to see our cinematic counterparts take equally unfortunate routes! In retrospect, I’d have watched the film first then taken its claustrophobic ambiance along with me to Garnder Cave in order to add a thrill chill to my AC one. Maybe next time...
We’d heard about the caves but never been. Google maps told me that the caves were a mere 33.3 kilometers from Rossland, just over the border in northern Washington. What could be easier and nicer on a broiling summer day than a quick twenty minute jaunt over the border for some free and environmentally-correct air conditioning? Or so I thought.
Before I realized google maps is...a dirty liar.
We drove down to the Waneta border crossing where the guard quizzed us on our destination. ‘Gardner Cave?’ he said, furrowing his rugged Mer’can brow. ‘You’re going to have to take some back roads to get there.’
Ah, back roads! we thought. The peaceful hum of rubber on asphalt, the quaint farmhouses and the stone-bored cows. Lovely.
We eased away from the border and turned on the GPS, setting our destination as Crawford State Park (where the caves are situated). A series of roads appeared: Boundary Road, Frisco Standard Road, Cedar Creek Road. Spot quiz: what do all these roads have in common? Answer: they’re all called ‘roads’.
Unfortunately, they aren’t roads, not really. Not in the ‘mellow country drive’ sense of the word. They’re rugged logging roads, carved through uncharted mountain lands. More Lord of the Rings than King of the Road.
As we drove on, the road ahead grew rougher and rougher and we began to climb higher and higher. The GPS now showed 68 kilometers to go. And our gas gauge showed less than a quarter tank.
Off went our environmentally-incorrect AC and in came the dusty, hot air.
I tried, as we bumped along, to use the GPS to determine how far Metaline Falls (the nearest town to the caves likely to have a gas station) was but for some reason our GPS, while it contains records of such Godless tracts of gravel and dirt as‘Frisco Standard Road’, contains no record of the town of Metaline Falls.
We knew the caves were an hour of rugged driving ahead, but we had no idea how much further the next gas station would be beyond that. Determined not to fail, I decided to press on while the wife fumed at my improvidence, gas-wise and my son retreated to the sanctuary of his iPod.
Not to keep you in suspense too long, but we finally made it, emerging from the woods onto a nicely-paved state highway right at the entrance to the park. By this time the empty light had been on for a while, but we made it to Metaline Falls, which was only about fifteen miles past the park, gassed up, and drove back to the caves, just in time for the last (free) tour of the day.
Our guide, Julia, was very friendly and professional, taking great pride in her knowledge of the cave and its history. The cave’s opening is a large hole in the ground surrounded by a metal picket fence. We entered it by clanging down a staircase into the cool, fresh depths of the underworld. It was 39 degrees US down there, which I think is about 3 degrees C (for Canadian). So bring a coat because the temperature shift from sweating to sweater is pretty dramatic.
The caves extend for over a thousand feet, but visitors are only allowed to explore about 500. The caves contain all the usual cave things: stalactites and stalagmites and a massive eight ton column that’s apparently the largest in the Pacific Northwest. There are also oddly shaped formations that resemble Christmas trees, frogs, alligators, and, amazingly...Richard Milhouse Nixon. Julia did a great job of pointing out all the relevant features and explaining the science of cave formation to us.
At about an hour long, it’s an interesting tour and the caves themselves have an interesting history. They were discovered around 1899 by Metaline bootlegger Ed Gardner. A local legend tells how, once, Garner was pursued by tax agents (bootlegging was legal at the time, but Gardner preferred not to pay taxes on the hootch he produced) and led them on a merry chase a couple of hundred feet past the caves, at which time he turned to face his pursuers and smiled. He was just over the Canadian border and beyond their jurisdiction. Later, legend also has it, he lost the land the caves are on to a local merchant called William Crawford--in a poker game. Crawford later donated the land to the state and got a park named after him.
Long a favourite site for locals tired of the heat, you can see where people have written their names on formations. Names of locals from as far back as the 1920s are preserved down there, slowly being covered by rock growth at the rate of something like a sixteenth of an inch every few centuries.
The tour over, we decided to return via the Nelway border crossing about 15 miles north of Metaline Falls. That route took us through Salmo on the way home. The travel time coming home was about the same as our journey in. There’s nothing wrong with the logging road route, as long as you’re gassed up and comfortable with the occasional dry creek bed running across the road. In our Toyota Matrix we were able to make it and only bottomed out twice.
Metaline Falls is also worth a stop, if only as an example of noble but dead dreams. A century ago, the young mining town (with a current population of just over 200) had some big plans. There are architecturally-interesting buildings there that look like part of a scheme to build a sizable city: an impressive brick playhouse and a very large and attractive apartment block testify to plans for a grid of wide streets filled with solid structures. That those dreams either died or never came to pass adds an air of poignancy as you drive around the now-quiet town.
We got home from our trip in the early evening and decided to round out our day with a screening of the spelunking-gone-terribly-wrong horror film The Descent. We were pleased to see our cinematic counterparts take equally unfortunate routes! In retrospect, I’d have watched the film first then taken its claustrophobic ambiance along with me to Garnder Cave in order to add a thrill chill to my AC one. Maybe next time...
