On our final travel day we stopped at Mt. St. Helens to explore the Ape Caves – they were lava tubes created over 2,000 years ago and are the longest in the U.S. (13,042 feet long).

To get there, we parked and hiked 1.3 miles in the slushy snow:

The cave entrance had only been discovered about 60 years ago by some loggers who were too afraid to enter. They told a caver about it who brought a pack of boy scouts with him to explore the cave. They named it Ape Cave after the ancient Native American legends of the “Apes” near the mountain (now referred to as Sasquatch or Big Foot).

Once inside, we were surprised by the massive size of the cave, both in height and in length.

Unfortunately, we didn’t have time to explore the tubes fully as we were running short on time, but it was still worth it!

We did spot a bigfoot-like creature. The same one we encountered at Grand Teton.

We decided to enjoy our last meal of vacation with the kids’ first visit to the Old Spaghetti factory, and were lucky enough to sit in Wally the Trolly:

We’ll follow up this post with some fun stats from the trip…