I found a tantalizing icon on a map of the Jemez Mountains with the label “Ice Cave,” so we recently made a winter adventure out of reaching it. It’s been quite dry so far this winter, but the Jemez gets more snow that here in town so we went with the full winter kit, including snowshoes, mittens and beanies, waterproof pants, puffies stowed in their backpacks, hand-warmers ready for deployment. Just in case. “Hope for the best, plan for the worst”, and all that.
The closest possible trailhead involved pulling off a forest road up past the Thompson ridge community (an impressively isolated grouping of houses deep in the Jemez woods). The first bit of the trail is on a forest road (covered in snow and closed this time of year) that clearly sees some action, as it was packed out with ski and snowshoe tracks. However, only a quarter mile up the trail we left the trail to head right off into the woods, breaking fresh snow toward our destination.
It was really, really beautiful. The last storm dropped heavy moist snow which froze in clumps to the trees and thus persisted. Snow through the shady woods was certainly deep enough to require the snowshoes, but not so deep that we had to struggle overmuch with trail-breaking. The little canyon we passed through was an unexpected gem, winding between mini-meadows with short little vertical walls.
We went with very little expectation of actually finding anything — basically the whole thing was an excuse to get out in the snow, wandering around making fresh tracks. I don’t think those icons on the map are to be considered very accurate, anyway, so I was surprised when we actually found the Ice Cave. It was nothing special as far as caves go but it was special to us that day. I didn’t notice anything “Icy” about the cave, not sure what that’s about, but it perfectly filled the role of ‘purposeful destination’ which seems helpful when motivating kids to exert themselves on a hike.
If you want to preserve the mystery and go find it on your own, don’t watch the video—keep all the sights and discoveries for your own family surprise.
P.s. any quotes you hear from the boys are surely from the Ghostbusters movies. We’ve watched the original and all sequels, including the one just released, many, many times in the past few months. My favorite was when I was getting ready for work, and Emerson (age 6) asks, apropos of nothing whatsoever, “Dad, when you get home from work can I have a sample of your brain?”
