My eyes adjusted to the dark quickly here where the natural entrance to the cave made a long thin skylight in the ceiling on the right.  We checked our headlamps, and slipped on the smooth leather gloves the national parks service requires for the introduction to caving tour I was on.
    
More than 70,000 visitors tour the caves each year, but only a couple dozen each week make the journey to Hansen’s Lake. My husband, Mike, and I were the only two on the tour this Saturday, although there is a five-person maximum.

Our guide, Barbara Reese, told us what to expect on this tour of the mostly unseen part of Timpanogos Cave, then we went through the large wooden door to the next room. A regular tour group was filing off to the left, but we headed for a gated stairway to the right.
    
The further behind we left the beaten path, the darker it got. Soon we could no longer hear the muffled voices of the other group. We stayed on a trail marked by reflective tape and crawled and climbed over rocks as the corridor got shorter and narrower.
    
At first I was concentrating too hard on my footing to notice my surroundings. When we stopped to look around it took me a minute to realize we were encircled by the same breathtaking formations that make the regular tour so popular.
    
Mike and I pointed our headlamps at the walls, the ceilings and in the corners. “Here, look at that,” and “Wow, over here,” punctuated our excitement.
    
Above our heads was cave bacon and soda straws. To our sides were deep red flow rock and smooth white columns. At one point I found a spiral helictite that Reese said she had never noticed before.

It felt like we were discovering the cave for the first time. We could really imagine how the first explorers through the caves in the 1880s must have felt.

It was going pretty smoothly, then we came to the rope. Watching Reese make her way down, I felt a little nervous. You had to hold onto the rope, duck pretty low, and shuffle sideways to see where you were going. At the bottom of the rope, the slope seemed to drop off into nothing.

With Reese pointing out good places for footing, I made it down without injury or making a fool of myself.

Soon we came to Martin’s Lake and rested a while on a large, cold boulder. Barbara shared some stories about the cave and some of her favorite spelunking spots in and around Utah. Click here to read more about other spots to go spelunking.

We turned off our headlamps and sat in the heavy darkness. You couldn’t even see your hand in front of your face. I decided I never wanted to get lost inside a cave.

The way out seemed shorter than the way in, and soon we emerged from the darkness, filthy and squinting just as another regular tour group was entering.

“I want to do what they did,” said one visitor.

Click here to find out what you want to plan on bringing if you go spelunking. 

       
IF YOU GO:
Timpanogos Cave National Monument
Hours: Open daily until Sept. 2, then on weekends until October
Cost: $15 per person
Length of tour: 3.5 hours round trip
Tickets: Advance tickets required; call the visitor center at 801-756-5239 to check availability
Etc.: Limited to five people per tour, must be at least 14 years old and in good physical condition due to the strenuous nature of the tour
What to bring:
• Clean, leather gloves
• Good hiking shoes
• Wear long pants and long sleeves, you will get dirty
• Unopened four-pack of AA batteries
• Drinking water and a sweatshirt or jacket
• Monument provides caving helmets and headlamps