Caves of the Guajataca Forest

Last weekend we had a flurry of activity showing friends some local caves. We believe that caves are the most amazing things on the planet and that everyone, especially people in Puerto Rico, should go into at least one in their lifetime! Sunday's trip involved David (our best friend) and his wife Ramona and 3 grand kids. Believe it or not David had never been to the Guajataca Forest and he has lived here his entire life! We were more than pleased to introduce his family to the nice trails and very nice cave in this forest that is basically his and our backyard. We met at the trail head which is marked and maintained. The visitor place (with maps) wasn't open yet since it was Sunday but Jeff and I had visited the cave several times before. After maybe 40 minutes of walking we came to the entrance where we laid out the law about not touching things or taking things and the reasons behind that. This cave is visited by a lot of people since it is marked and easy to find and despite the damage visitors have done it is still very nice. We distributed lights and began a nice tour of the place.

 

After exploring the entire cave and seeing how excited the kids (and David) were we went down some other trails to visit other caves we knew about. We knew about 2 but found a couple new ones as the kids scrambled and starting to recognize what to look for. All 5 caves were along a trail! We did not even venture on the long walks to 2 other ones. Two of the caves were kind of walk-through caves and the others were small but bigger than we initially thought! We spent about 5 hours in the forest and enjoyed the day...we suspect David will have to bring the kids back to the forest in the future!