Caving

This last Friday was flex day and quite a day.  In my ward(church) I was called to serve in the young woman's program.  We meet every Wednesday and every Sunday.  We have fun activities that help us learn and grow and are hopefully fun.  Well every year there is also girls camp.  Here it is in June.  As you get older in the young women program you also advance in the stages or levels.  The same goes for girls camp.  There are levels and each level has certain things they are supposed to certify for.  Like building fires and putting them out, CPR, first aid, and many other things.  They are supposed to build on top of each level.  Here they want you to have all the certification done before camp in June.

So this year we decided to have a camp out and try to get it all done during that camp out.  So we decided to go to Alabaster Caverns State Park in Western Oklahoma.  They have caves to go through and we have a Sister in the ward who knows them very well who offered to take us through them.

Some of the girls didn't have school Friday but most did so they had to wait for the girls to get out of school before getting on the road.  It is a 4 hour drive and they had a couple of stops to make on the way.  They figured that we wouldn't get to the camp ground until about 11 pm.  So we opted to have my family take whatever tents needed to go brought to our house.  We left Friday around 10 am and found a camp ground that we liked that would hold the 4 tents.  I say 4 because although we had 15 girls go on this trip they wouldn't be sleeping in tents.  They slept in a cave.  The cave wouldn't only hold so many and since I took my children and so did the other leaders we opted for tents to let the girls have the cave.

 We got there and set up.  Here are two of the tents that I set up.  The one on the left held a leader and her daughter.  The one on the right held a leader, her husband and their daughter.  If you notice the pole in the back ground than you did better than I did.  For all my camping I don't think I've ever camped somewhere where there was a light pole in the camp ground and I set up their tents right under the light.  The one on the left was protected because it was under a tree and the other one...well lets just say I offered to move it when they got here.  The other thing about the tent on the right is that they woke up in the middle of the night wight a scorpion in their tent.  They joked about how much I must not like them to set up their tent under the light and on top of a scorpion nest.  I felt horrible.  They survived and the adventure was just beginning.

 Here is the camp before anyone else got here.

 Here is our spare tent that we set up for another family that was coming.

 There is our tent and Yana sitting on the picnic table.

 This is the creek that ran right next to our camp.

This is the camp kitchen we got for Christmas and we just had to use it.  We were so excited and boy was it great to have.

 The other nice thing is that there was a swing set in camp so it came in handy with the little kids.  My girls practically lived on them.

 I did say caving right?  Well the first cave we went to was called Hoe Handle cave and it was really muddy.  I made sure to mention muddy right.  We practically spent the entire cave crawling in mud.  I guess it was muddier than normal.  It was still fun.  I took my hard hat off for the picture.

We went through two caves.  The first one was a beginner cave of sorts.  It helped us determine who shouldn't go through the next cave.  After the first cave we came back to came, grabbed a snack and hiked up to the next cave.  It was quite the hike and loads of fun.  This cave wasn't muddy at all and it had a lot of climbing and narrow spots and one particularly fun spot where we had to swim in very cold water.  The water was only about 1.5 foot deep but the hole was only about 2 feet.  So we to crawl which was hard so it was one person at a time and when it was my turn I just lifted my feet and swam.  It was so much easier.  It was also a lot of fun.  When we made it out of that cave we took a long hike around to see more pretty scenery.

It was a lot of fun.  After the caving was all over we ate and packed up camp.  My husband and the other guys in camp had pretty much taken down most of camp by the time we got back.  So it was a matter showering.  First you had to go to the field house and rinse the mud off your clothes and then you could go to the actual showers.  It was kind of odd.  You showered but they didn't want you getting dressed in the showers because of how many people needed to use them so you showered and wrapped up in the towel.  Then you stepped out the door, grabbed your bag and walked around the building to bathrooms to get dressed.  Talk about uncomfortable.  We had a great time and I discovered that I really enjoy caving and I was very thankful for the hard hat because I hit my head so many times.  I hope you all had a great weekend.  We sure did.