A cool getaway.

Byline: Bob Keefer The Register-Guard

OREGON CAVES NATIONAL MONUMENT - It's practically a summer afternoon outside in Southern Oregon, but at the moment here in the Ghost Room it remains a drippy 42 degrees, just as it is year-round, day and night, no matter what the weather up above.

We're hundreds of feet underground, as deep in the cave as most people get to go, when our guide, park ranger Tom Siewert, shines his flashlight on what looks like a stairway to heaven. In fact, the steep, metal stairway - like something you might find on a large ship - leads from the dimly lit Ghost Room, a chamber that could hold most of a Seven-Eleven store, up to a towering formation called Paradise Lost.

"See this stairway?" he warns. "We'll be going up and then coming right back down. If anyone's nervous, you can wait for us at the bottom." He pauses. "Anyone not want to go?"

No one answers. Perhaps no one wants to be left alone in the dark at the bottom of the stairs, but all 16 of us tourists climb the dizzying stairs, hands firmly on rails, for a little glimpse of Paradise, which proves to resemble a two-story, coffee-brown waterfall, frozen in time as it cascades through a silo-like room.

Discovered in 1874, this is Oregon's largest natural cave system, a wandering network of three miles of underground tunnels and rooms carved out by millions of years of erosion in a ledge of marble 4,000 feet up in the Siskiyou Mountains. A National Monument since 1909, the cave serves as home to eight species of bats as well as a host of smaller animals, including some weird little insects found nowhere else.

Over the millennia, the cave also proved to be the final resting place for a handful of larger animals that may have wandered in and become lost or, perhaps more likely, may have died just inside an entrance and then been washed deeper into the tunnels. A grizzly bear skeleton that's at least 50,000 years old turned up in one deep room.

There's an Ice Age jaguar - when was the last time you saw a wild jaguar in Oregon? - and a 10,000-year-old black bear, whose remains are still visible, protected by glass, on the public tour. And the cave is home to one of the largest collections of salamander fossils anywhere.

Besides all the natural history, though, the cave makes a great weekend getaway, thanks in large part to the surprisingly stately Oregon Caves Chateau, a Depression-era rustic lodge that ranks right up there with the far better known Timberline and Crater Lake lodges.

Built in 1934, the compact, six-story chateau straddles Cave Creek, which flows out of the mouth of the cave through the lodge dining room and into a steep, wooded canyon below. So vertical is the terrain that from the uphill side, you enter the lodge - which is sheathed unexpectedly in rough cedar bark - on the fourth floor.

There you find yourself in a dark, cozy lobby that looks like it hasn't changed since the days of Will Rogers and Fred Harvey. Peeled, 30-inch logs and hand-hewn beams support the ceiling. An enormous double-sided fireplace, built of the same Oregon marble that lines the caves, dominates the room.

The lobby is furnished with its original and still quite comfortable Monterey furniture, built by the Mason Manufacturing Co. in Los Angeles to complement Spanish Mission-style homes. An antique grand piano awaits a musical guest, and a cabinet offers a wide assortment of board games. Magazines and a few odd mystery novels make the lobby a perfect place to linger.

So does the art. On the walls, a little difficult to make out in the darkness, are some two dozen original, hand-colored, 1930s-vintage landscape photographs by Fred Kiser, some as large as 30 inches by 40 inches. Kiser was at one time the official photographer of Crater Lake. (The small stone structure right on the lake's rim by the visitor's center was originally his studio.)

The Oregon Caves Chateau's 22 guest rooms, which are basic but comfortable with no phone or television, run from $75 to $125 a night. In a welcome bit of straightforwardness, these are actual full prices, including all fees and taxes. Room price depends on the view, which might include a small waterfall and trout pool built on the uphill side or the cascading stream on the downhill side; the $125 rate gives you a two-room connecting suite.

Down the log stairs from the lobby level, the chateau offers a gift shop with books, T-shirts and an assortment of local art works; and a 1930s coffee shop, with its original, long maple and birch counter and stainless-steel swivel seats.

The coffee shop serves lunch; a free continental breakfast for lodge guests is available in the lobby.

A more formal dining room open by reservation for dinner offers a small menu that includes a New York steak dinner, $16.95, as its most expensive entree.

The chateau has survived two near disasters in its history, one natural and one man-made.

On Dec. 22, 1964, a deep snowfall followed by warm, heavy rain sent tons of water, mud, rocks and logs down Cave Creek Canyon, smashing into the dining room and gift shop level of the lodge like a small tsunami. The dining room was devastated, and the entire lodge building was actually moved off its foundations. Some 3,500 yards of debris washed into the building.

Despite recommendations that the lodge be demolished, public support led to its being rebuilt, and it opened on schedule the following May. The main legacy of the flood is the generic dining room furniture that was bought to replace the original Monterey tables and chairs, destroyed in the deluge.

The second near disaster was bureaucratic. Two years ago, worried about the environmental impact of cave tours conducted by a private business, the National Park Service took over operation of the tours, which had been a money maker for the chateau concessionaire.

That caused the concessionaire to pull out at the end of its contract, and the chateau was left without an operator at the beginning of last season.

Into this breach stepped a nonprofit organization from Cave Junction. Scrambling quickly, the Illinois Valley Community Response Team took over the lodge last year and kept its doors open, running the lodge more with the feel of a local bed and breakfast than with the atmosphere of a corporate national park franchise.

As run by the Park Service, the cave tour costs $7.50 and is about 90 minutes long, leaving each hour on the hour from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily and following an improved trail. The park service is evaluating the possibility of longer, off-trail tours, but they're not now available. You can't enter the cave on your own. Even in May, tours were fully booked an hour or more ahead, so you'll want to buy tickets and reserve a spot as soon as you arrive at the monument.

Though it's not wilderness spelunking, a cave visit is not the granny tour you might expect. The Park Service calls it "moderately strenuous," which is a reasonable description given the stooping and shuffling that's required along dark, wet passages, the number of stairs, and the possibility of conking your head on sudden low ceilings.

Children have to be at least 42 inches tall (small children can be taken in on a "family tour" of the first room at no charge), and a set of metal stairs in front of the Visitor's Center gives a preview of the hundreds of stairs you'll have to climb.

You'll want to dress warmly - 42 damp degrees for more than an hour can become very chilly, and gloves are not a bad idea. Though the cave guides said only a couple of people a week hit their heads hard enough to require assistance, a cloth baseball cap - reversed for better visibility - or a thick stocking cap might prevent a dorky looking bandage later on.

Siewert, our tour guide, stopped frequently along the way to explain the geological development of the cave, to talk about its unique biology, and to point out a small amount of vandalism left over from the days when visitors thought it a proper thing to break off cave formations for souvenirs.

One large counter-height rock, covered in creamy flowstone, tempted early visitors to sign their names in pencil. Among the signatures is that of Thomas Condon, the well known University of Oregon geologist, who scrawled his name in 1885; his penciled name is already sealed into the translucent rock, which continues to grow at geologic speed as mineral-laden water washes over it.

One tour participant, an out-of-work programmer visiting Oregon from Sunnyvale, Calif., thought the signatures were the most interesting part of the tour. Rena Takahashi said Oregon Caves was nothing like Carlsbad or other massive caverns she's visited.

"It's much smaller," she said. "You could park an airplane in the largest room in Carlsbad. But this doesn't have the wear and tear that other caves have. I thought seeing the names was the most interesting thing. It was the worst part! But it was the most interesting."

A lesser known landmark even in the Northwest, Oregon Caves now draws about 80,000 visitors a year, a number that has held steady for a decade, though it's down some from about 120,000 a year in the 1970s. The huge Biscuit Fire nearby knocked visitation down to about 50,000 last year.

"Some of these parks have an instant public appeal," says Roger Brandt, the monument's chief of interpretation, who worked at national parks throughout the West before coming here five years ago. "Others require more ranger interaction to help people appreciate them. This is more of a story park. And the story is not real obvious. So you have to take people out and tell them the story."

Brandt says the typical visitor at Oregon Caves is surprisingly well educated and wants to hear the story in some detail. The monument's visitor surveys show about a third of the visitors have four-year college degrees with another third in college or with a two-year degree. A handful are retirees and the rest are children. "This audience can understand some pretty highfalutin talk," he said with a laugh.

Lately, perhaps in response to a book and a public television show about great national park lodges, a larger number of people are showing up primarily to see the chateau, Brandt said.

"I am surprised at how many people come up here to see the lodge and then decide they ought to do the cave tour."

Oregon Caves National Monument is 20 miles southeast of Cave Junction on Oregon Highway 46, a narrow, winding mountain highway not suitable for trailers.

The park is open daily except for Christmas and Thanksgiving; cave tours are not offered in winter. Call [phone] for park information.

The chateau is open only in the summer. Call [phone] for chateau information and reservations.

Bob Keefer can be reached at 338-2325 or bkeefer@guardnet .com.

CAPTION(S):

A visitor takes in the tranquil settings in and around the chateau. The lodge has 22 guest rooms (without phones or televisions) that run from $75 to $125 a night.