Boyd Cave is one of a string of lava tubes off China Hat Road southeast of Bend, on the northern flank of Newberry Volcano inside Deschutes National Forest. It formed somewhere between 75,000 and 400,000 years ago in the same flow as Skeleton Cave, and it trends toward Skeleton's Bear Passage, so the two are pieces of one plumbing system.
As a tube it is unusually intact, with very little interior collapse and clear pahoehoe flow structure on the walls, ceiling and floor. Pahoehoe is the ropy, coiled texture that molten basalt takes when it moves smoothly, and seeing it frozen overhead is a good reminder of what the ceiling used to be doing.
The roof is the detail worth knowing. In places it is under three feet thick. There is not much between the passage and the sagebrush above it, which is exactly why the Forest Service is careful about how the cave is used.
You enter down a stairway through a skylight about ten feet across, where the roof gave way. The original stair was wooden, built in 1969, and was replaced with steel in the 1970s. Inside it is mostly walking passage, with one ten foot hands and knees crawl about two thirds of the way in.
The cave was known to local cavers as Coyote Butte Cave, after the cinder cone nearby, before it took the name of a Brooks-Scanlon Lumber Company employee who is said to have found it in the late 1920s. The Forest Service made the name official around 1970.
There is no lighting. Bring more than one light each, expect around 42 degrees whatever the season, and check the forest's current access rules before you go, since these tubes close periodically to protect bats.
Right now the answer to that is no. Boyd Cave sits inside the Forest Service’s Cabin Butte restoration closure, which shuts all access to the area, day use included, from May 1, 2026 to April 30, 2027, while the forest is thinned and burned. The order names the Boyd Cave picnic area among the closed places.
Other places on the map within a couple of hours.
