Stephanie (if you read the Austin update you will know who she is) said on my way west I had to stop and see the Caverns of Sonora in, of course, Sonora, TX. I got there in the late afternoon, but they had one more tour starting about 35 minutes from when I arrived. I thought the $20 price was a bit steep, but the timing allowed me to walk Abbey around for a while and I was in no rush so I decided “What the heck!” One of the endorsements for the caverns said, “Even Texans can’t exaggerate how beautiful it is.” Having lived in Texas for 6 years I knew exactly what they meant. Mary Beth and I always had to apply the “Texas factor” when deciding whether or not to follow a local’s recommendation on some supposedly quaint or charming town in Texas. Back to the subject at hand. The beginning part of the cavern started out pretty inconspicuously and I was starting to have doubts, but I was soon turned around. Not that I’m a cave expert by any stretch of the imagination (though I have been to Inner Space Caverns in Georgetown, TX!), but it had an amazing amount and variety of formations. We were told by our guide that it has one of the foremost collection of helictites (hope I spelled that right) of any cave in the world. Helictites, as opposed to stalactites and stalagmites, grow in directions other than straight up or down. I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to find out just how they do this. No matter how they do it, some of them are pretty amazing, including the “butterfly” helictite – see the last picture which was shot with the guide sidelighting it with his flashlight. What the guide called the “Christmas Tree” effect on many of the formations was formed by water splashing on the formations and new crystals forming. I highly recommend this place if you ever find yourself passing through Sonora, which is pretty much in the middle of nowhere, but it is on the way to Big Bend.
The RV park at the Caverns of Sonora were not quite as spectacular, to put it nicely, but the price was right and I didn’t feel like driving 2 more hours to the next town on the map. So we stayed the night and had the place pretty much to ourselves save the caretakers. The next morning it was on to Big Bend.
