I guess we hadn’t gotten enough of the hot humidity this summer, because right after getting back from Savannah we headed out for some local camping. Growing up it was an annual tradition to go camping with as many Ruppel family as we could gather. Some years we had shelters and canvas tents, others we had regular tent sites side by side. Now that we’re all grown up we mooch on our parents fifth wheel trailers ;). Not a bad progression if I may say so myself.
The Hinkles are our regular camping team and a weekend free of racing happened to line up with a weekend free of shooting, and a weekend free of home projects, so we all made our way to O’Bannon State Park near Corydon Indiana. I hadn’t ever been here before but it was a different set up than most parks I’ve stayed at. The campground was spread out from most of the other amenities like the picnic ground and pool, but the sites were super shaded and surprisingly empty for this time of year. Other areas could be reached by a bike… if you were determined enough. Jeff and I barely made it, Mom and Julie gave up on us. Sam and Clay were the smart ones in the truck. Nearby is a canoeing company but yet again the river was too low to make a trip without any portaging. We had tried this river a few years ago when we all stayed at Marengo caves and ran into the same issue. I’m not sure how the river was low with the weather pattern from this summer, but I think we’ve given up on the Blue River. Instead Jeff, Clay, Sam, and I went for a tour through Wyandotte cave. We took the 45 minute tour versus the 20 minute tour because why wouldn’t we stay in the cave a little longer on such a muggy weekend.
I was definitely not expecting a cave system as large as this one was. I was expecting something along the scale of Marengo Caves where there are rooms about the size of a living room, but this system used to have tours of up to 8 hours crawling through the system. This was something much closer to that of Mammoth Caves in Kentucky. If Wyandotte wasn’t mammoth it was definitely huge. Longer tours were available before the white nose syndrome affected the bats, but since the site has no water access to wash off after the tour, they keep the paths limited to foot traffic, meaning 45 minutes is now the long tour. No running water means bathrooms are port a potties, you’ve been warned.
Wyandotte caves were home to a type of formation I had never seen, helictites. Stalagmites and stalactites grow from the top or bottom of the cave as water drips, but the helictites grow sideways and no one understands why or how. There are tons of them in this system. I think they said the growth rate is 1 cm per hundreds if not thousands of years? Whatever the number it’s an incredibly slow rate, meaning keep your hands off the cave formations! We want to keep seeing all the cool things! As we made out way back to the surface the humidity hit us like a wall about 6 feet from the mouth. We had forgotten what misery the soupy humidity feels like after being in a cool 50 degrees for a while. I highly recommend touring in the middle of the afternoon so you’re not miserable the rest of the day.
The rest of the weekend we spent exploring some trails in the park by foot and on bike (only Sam and Clay were in this kind of shape), hiking up the fire tower (only Jeff and I were dumb enough), cooking out on the grill, cruising around on bikes, and discovering Mom’s hidden talent for Can Jam. She put the rest of us to shame her first time playing. Watch out for her at parties, she goes straight for the slot because she doesn’t need another strategy. We had yet another fantastic weekend and I hope I can keep convincing Jeff that camping is fun. Those trailers certainly go a long way.
Sugared Sunshine 