Beware The Cave Troll

My family and I have always been pretty avid campers and hikers. When my sister and I were little and not capable of backpacking, we did a lot of car camping.

On one of these trips, when I am about ten and my sister is six, we go to visit a national park famous for its large cave system. Of course, we go to see the caves. We are underground walking around, reading the signs, listening to explanations of various rock outcroppings and the like, when we see a large tunnel and a path going down it. We assume it leads to another part of the caves. Oddly, there are no lights, but we figure it must be lighted further in.

This part is important: in no way is the tunnel blocked off, there are no signs telling us not to go there, nothing. So, we start walking. After about a minute of this, still within sight of the tunnel entrance, there are still no lights and no one else is there. We agree that this must be wrong, so we turn around to head back, using my dad’s phone as a flashlight. This is where the jerk park ranger comes in. He’s standing at the entrance to the tunnel, and as soon as we’re in earshot, he starts yelling.

Ranger: “So! You think you’re some sort of big-shot explorers, wandering off into dangerous caves on your own with your phones and flashlights!”

I don’t remember a whole lot of it, but I do remember that he goes on in this vein for a while, just yelling at us about how stupid we were to go into the cave, with me and my sister hiding behind our parents. At some point, my sister starts to cry.

Ranger: *Still yelling* “I have half a mind to throw you out of the park!”

My dad eventually calmed him down, and we didn’t get thrown out, but we were all pretty shaken. My sister was still sobbing, and I was pretty close to crying myself.

A couple of minutes later, once we had been consoled, we saw the park ranger staring at the tunnel entrance. He walked over to some discarded fencing and sheepishly set up a barrier in front of the tunnel. From what we could gather, it was his job to block the tunnel off, and hadn’t! He didn’t even apologize afterward or look remotely sorry for scaring two children into tears. In retrospect, we should’ve taken the fact that there were no lights as a larger sign not to go there, but we figured that in a large, well-maintained cave with lots of tunnels you are supposed to walk through to get from cave to cave, this wasn’t that big of a deal.