Split Rock Cave Horror

Day 94

I was not much of a Boy Scout when I was younger but occasionally I would go with the guys in our neighborhood on some camping/scouting trips. I like the outdoors but I am more of a city guy. I can spend time outdoors but not for long times. A week is about where I hit my limit.

One of these week-long summer trips was down in Southern Utah. We were going to hike some of the canyons in the Canyonlands. For those unfamiliar with the terrain, it is extremely dry, hot and rocky. We drove down the hundreds of miles in the summer time and it was miserable. We spent about eight-nine hours cramped in this family van and the air conditioner was going out. But we finally made it.

(This is not the actual cave but it shows how big the mouth of the cave was.)

We were going to stay the night at Split-Rock Cave, which is exactly what it says. It is a huge rock with a split right down the middle and has a cave that goes all the way to the end. We were all tired of being cramped in the van and so a bunch of us went into the cave for shade and to stretch out. This cave was big. You could have driven the whole van into it easily.

We all walked into the cave and journeyed all the way to the end. The crevasse was a few feet wide at the beginning but by the time we got to the end, it was only a inch or so. It was nice, cool and dark at the back of the cave. A few of my friend sat down but I remained standing. We talked and one of my friends, Danny said how creepy being at the back of the cave was. As a joke I thought it would be funny to nonchalantly pick up a small stone and chuck it behind him to freak him out. I picked up a rock without anyone knowing and threw it behind him. It hit the wall and rolled to his back.

And that is when we ALL freaked out. As soon as the rock hit the wall, the wall started to spread out and move away from where the stone made its impact. Danny and my other friends that were sitting jumped up away from the wall. Everywhere we looked the walls were moving.

And in a scene ripped right out of the movie Aliens I looked up at the crack in the ceiling which was only a foot or so above my head. The sun light was creeping in so we could still see a little. In the crack was thousands of spiders all crawling over each other.


(I was going to post of pic of a bunch of spiders but that wigged me out too much!)

And we ran more like Girl Scouts than we did Boy Scouts. And we refused to stay the night in the cave even though that nest of spiders was deep in the cave. Our Scoutmasters were furious that we had to find another place to stay the night. But there was absolutely no way I was going to stay in that cave and get my face eaten off!