A privately owned California cave, kept secret for decades, now shares its mysteries
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| Enter if you dare. Live in a cave tiny home. |
SF Gate Managing Editor Katie Dowd, June 16, 2024: The first person to peer into the 18-inch crack in an Amador ["Lover"] County hillside got quite the surprise. The gap swallowed the sunlight, exhaling sweet, cool air.
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| They're better in Buddhist Asia (Chiang Mai) |
Translucent pillars flushed orange in the glow of weak candlelight. Deeper inside, the cavern held secrets, treasures, and creatures that would be found — and forgotten — over the next 170 years.
Black Chasm Cavern is one of Earth’s rarest creations full of gems. Although the Indigenous people of California likely stumbled onto it long before, the first recorded sighting was in the 1850s when the hills around Volcano, a hamlet about an hour east of California's capital, Sacramento, were crawling with gold miners.
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| What did cavemen do in caverns? Dream? |
One of them stumbled onto that 18-inch crack. After the disappointment that it held no gold subsided, he saw a new opportunity: tourism. [Why should everyone be limited to Calabasas Caverns?]
- Early goldminers became tourist guide, giving candle tours for a "pinch" of gold. But it was a scam: Midway, deep in the cave, they would blow out the candle and demand another pinch to guide adventurers to the exit.
Guides at Black Chasm Cavern today tell visitors the story of how the first chamber ended up in its present state. After descending a tight, steep set of stairs, explorers find themselves in a space filled with blunt stalactites.
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| The best European archaeology is in Spain. |
Each stalactite takes thousands of years to form as water slowly drips down [depositing minerals in their wake]. In a moment, gold miners destroyed them, chipping off the tips to take home as souvenirs.
Those stalactites will never grow back [not even in millions of years]. Privately owned California cave, kept secret for decades, shares mysteries (sfgate.com)
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