Chamber of the Basilisk

[J Slate]

I've gone through this before, and decided to spice things up a bit by leaving the trailhead at midnight with a new moon It wasn't too bad actually, I had my 150 lumen headlamp and someone else in our group had a 230 lumen one. We found our way to the plateau without too much trouble, then to the next one, and before we knew it we were getting close. There was a massive shooting star that shot halfway across the sky and it was burning red, we thought we could find the crater it would make and go check it out It took 35 minutes to get within 50 feet of the hole (said the gps) but it took an additional 15 minutes to find the double arch, then 15 after that to find the hole. With an infinite amount of stars above us we enjoyed the scene and went down into the hole, we agreed that we would turn all lights off once whoever was rappelling was halfway down. It was way cool, but smelled pretty funky, probably from the container full of some unknown liquid that we threw down the hole and it exploded We all got down and we hiked out. There were beautiful lighting storms with a flash every two seconds or so. The hiking was really easy because it had rained here about 2 hours ago, and the sand was hardening and not letting our feet get weary. But the mud in some spots in the valley made it more difficult to climb. On the way out we saw at least 12 black widows all about the size of silver dollars. We got pretty freaked but nobody got bit, although one of us came reeeealllly close when he walked into the middle of the web without knowing it. Car to car took about 2 1/2 hours.