Redmond Caves

The Redmond Caves are six lava tubes inside the city of Redmond, Oregon, jointly managed by the city and the Bureau of Land Management. Five of them lie in Redmond Caves Park and have been known locally for more than a hundred years.

They are the far northern end of the Horse Lava Tube System. The flow that made both carried on into the Redmond Dry Canyon and stopped near Crooked River Ranch, and the whole thing is about 80,000 years old.

Prehistoric Native Americans knew these caves, which the archaeological artefacts found inside make plain. They may also have been the first caves in Central Oregon known to Euro-Americans; an old stage road ran past them in the 1870s.

What people then proposed doing with them is a small comedy. They were considered for potato storage as early as the 1910s. A Madras resident wanted to grow mushrooms in them. The Deschutes Historical Society was once approached about using the site as its museum.

In 1954 the Lions Club of Redmond opened an entrance into a cave nobody had been able to reach. Inside the dusty floor they found the footprints of modern shoes. Two boys later admitted squeezing in the night before. The cave turned out to be the longest on the site, and what looked like a Y-shaped passage was eventually shown to be a loop.

Two more boys, Dick Nooe and Harry Sly, were shown artefacts from the caves by John Berning of the Lions Club, went back repeatedly to sift the dirt and pumice, and built a substantial collection. When they were told they were in breach of the Preservation of American Antiquities Act, they donated everything to the University of Oregon.

In the 1960s the Office of Civil Defense assessed the three largest caves as fallout shelters, rating them for up to 450 people, and in the early 1970s packets went out to households in Bend and Redmond with directions to their nearest shelter, for use in the event of an atomic attack or a volcanic eruption.

Visiting is simple. The site is 0.8 miles south of Redmond Airport on SW Airport Way, open year round and free, and what you walk into is one lava tube whose collapse left five caves. Take three sources of light each, watch for rattlesnakes, and leave pets outside, because they are not allowed in the caves. There are no toilets or other amenities, and firearm discharge, trapping and geocaching are all prohibited.