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Oregon Caves National Monument

Photo: Oregon Caves National Monument (National Park Service) / CC BY 2.0

🕳️ Caves

Oregon Caves National Monument

Cave Junction, OR · Siskiyou Mountains

About

Twenty miles up a mountain road from Cave Junction, the Marble Halls of Oregon are one of only a handful of caves in the country carved from marble rather than limestone, and the rangers still lead you through by the glow of handheld candlelight on the seasonal tour. The half-mile route climbs past the massive Ghost Room, the soda-straw stalactites and drapery of Paradise Lost, and the underground stream the old guides named the River Styx, with calcite columns and flowstone that took hundreds of thousands of years to form. It is a tight, hands-on cave with low ceilings and 500 steps, not a paved walk-through, which is exactly why it stays one of the West's most memorable underground hours.

Highlights

Candlelight cave tour through a rare marble cavernThe massive Ghost Room chamberSoda-straw stalactites and drapery of Paradise LostThe underground stream named the River StyxCalcite columns and flowstone hundreds of thousands of years old

Getting there

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Curated guides that feature Oregon Caves National Monument.

America's Best Caves22 places

America's Best Caves

Step out of the daylight into another world: the longest cave on the planet in Kentucky, a desert chamber big enough to swallow a stadium in New Mexico, an underground waterfall in Tennessee, and a living crystal cavern in Arizona. Some you walk, some you ride a boat through, and one you crawl with a headlamp. America's great caves and caverns, from the national parks to the lantern-lit show caves.