Lake Santo and Lake Lamar...and not dying in a cave.

We have one flashlight in Italy. It is small and packed easily; one of those single LED camping gadgets. It's got a small flat rhomboid body and four bendable legs which seem like they should be really handy. I like it but if you combined a water strider (or Jesus bug), an end table from a doll house, and a real flashlight then removed about 80% of each constituent's usefulness you would basically have this light. The point is we have one. I put it in my camera bag today because I picked where to go based on seeing Abisso di Lamar (The Abyss of Lamar) on the map. It was a happy bonus that the two adjacent little lakes were lovely to wander around.

The short trail to the cave wasn't marked and it quickly thereafter stopped trying to be helpful and just went straight up a very steep hill (65-70 degree slope). It was steep enough that I had to put the camera away (because I needed both tree root grabbers) before going up. The entrance to the cave was fairly unassuming except for the memorial plaque to a guy named Luigi translating to, "in the (cave) your voice still resonates". That was my first clue that this cave might be a little too much fun for my Jesus bug-doll house-flashlight, but armed with said torch I entered. After about ten feet I could stand. The floor sloped gently down, it was damp and a little slick. At the same time that it got tall enough to stand it took a gentle turn to the left. From were I was standing, with my tiny electric ember, I could see that another 6 or 7 feet of floor. At the end of that 6 or 7 feet of floor was the absence of floor. I could just make out the far wall about 10 feet past said absence of floor. When I tossed a small stone it took a good full second to reach the bottom after bouncing somewhere off the side. That makes it at least a 9.8 meter fall and I'm gonna go ahead and guess around 40 feet*. This is the point at which I slowly turned around and directly exited of the Abyss of Lamar. Then I got my camera and compact tripod and went back inside and took a photo with my tiny light and a shutter speed of 30m seconds. After finding the Abisso and not dying I spent a few hours walking around the lakes. The weather here right now is perfect for wandering around aimlessly. Even Darth seemed to enjoy the day. Here are some photos.

*Correction: the Abyss of Lamar turns out to be just a bit deeper than I had guessed. The bottom of the vertical cave is slightly less than 1,000 feet down. I am a really good guesser.