SEQUOIA Crystal Cave in Sequoia National Park

The entrance to the cave is a beautiful natural arch 30 feet wide and 10(?) feet high. A good trail 1600 feet long provides access to the most scenic parts of the cavern. Since the first 500 feet are retraced on the return trip the total distance traveled underground is nearly one-half mile. In side rooms adjoining the entrance, a light generator and rest rooms have been installed. Thirty feet inside the entrance, an appropriate wrought iron gate resembling a huge spider web forms an effective barricade. The cave is illuminated with indirect white light, and the wires and fixtures are so well concealed that they are not noticeable from the trail. There is good ventilation throughout, and the temperature never varies more than two degrees from the normal of fifty degrees.

The entrance leads directly into a large room some twenty feet in width and one hundred sixty feet long, with average height of about nine feet. A flat ledge about four feet high projects from the east wall almost ten feet into the room, and beneath it there is a shelf two feet high. The cave floor beneath this shelf is visible through small, natural windows dissolved in the marble, and is seen to slope down toward the east wall where the cave stream is concealed in a deep marble trench. The ceiling is irregular in pattern with grotesque solution remnants of marble and massive deposits of dripstone pointing downward. There also are several small, vertical shafts in the ceiling, commonly used as nesting sites by canyon wrens.

The road to the cave passes through fine Transition Zone forests.