James Richardson, a federal fisheries employee, reached these caverns on 11 November 1878 and wrote his claim of discovery on the wall in carbide from his miner's lamp. It is still legible. The cave was known before that as Chalk Cave and as Baird Cave, after the naturalist Spencer Fullerton Baird.
The limestone here is old, dated to at least two hundred million years, and the system was cut by flowing water that has since drained away, leaving eight known rooms hung with stalactites, stalagmites, soda straws, columns and flowstone. The Discovery Room holds every one of those formation types, and it was found by accident.
That accident is the reason anyone can visit. Until 1964 the caverns were reached by a handful of determined cavers who squeezed down through a hole in the ceiling barely wide enough for one person. To open the cave to the public, crews blasted a tunnel from a rock face into the mountain, aiming for the lowest known chamber, the Basement. On the way in they knocked down a large rock wall and exposed the Discovery Room, which turned out to be the finest room in the system, and which sits below the Basement, so the Basement is not the basement at all. The push to preserve the place came from Grace Tucker, an attorney from Chehalis, Washington, who took sole ownership in 1955.
Getting there is half the trip and the better half. The caverns sit above the McCloud arm of Shasta Lake, and the tour starts with a catamaran across the water followed by a bus up the mountainside, so you arrive having already seen the lake from three hundred feet up. Tours run year round. The cave stays around 58 degrees Fahrenheit, and there are a good number of steps once you are inside.
Other places on the map within a couple of hours.
