Ice Cave

This is a 360 video of an ice cave within the Maquoketa Caves system of connected caves at Maquoketa Caves State Park. ¹With more caves than any state park, Maquoketa Caves is one of Iowa’s most unique outdoor attractions. As one of the state’s earliest state parks, Maquoketa Caves has been a popular destination for picnickers and hikers since the 1860s. Let’s take a closer look at this cave. We will follow the explorer’s path without moving the arrows to see around us.

00:00-00:11

We are standing in the dark. It is pitch black like a moonless night when cloud cover has obscured all of the city lights. We can’t see a thing in front of us. The explorer has a headlamp on and walks in front of the camera. With his light, we begin to see a small section of the gray, white and tan cave wall. As he moves, what we can make out of the cave wall changes. At the top of the video are the words Maquoketa State Park, Ice Cave 360.

00:11-00:18

From his place to the left of the stationary camera, the explorer looks up and down the cave wall. The top of the cave wall appears to roll like ocean waves. A section at the top of the cave appears to be coming out towards us as the light hits it.

00:18-00:31

The explorer walks out of camera range taking the light with him. We are left standing in the pitch black of the cave. As he walks away, we can make out the top of his white hard hat. As he moves in the pitch black, the hard hat looks like an indistinguishable bouncing dot on a sing-along video.

00:32-00:34

The explorer has moved us to another section of the cave. We are still in the dark. We can’t see a thing in front of us. As the explorer explores this section of the cave, we can see the light reflecting off of the top of the tan and gray cave wall like glimpses of a stage floor as a curtain sways back and forth as it is closed at the end of a performance.

00:35-00:53

The explorer moves through the cave in the pitch dark. As he comes into view, we see the light of the explorer’s headlamp. It is bouncing off the wall of the cave like a cat’s laser pointer toy. The sections of the cave wall that the light reveals have large craters and bumps like popped kernels of corn.

00:54-01:01

The explorer turns toward the camera in pitch black. The light of the headlamp gets closer and closer like a light on a train running through a tunnel.

¹“Maquoketa Caves State Park.”Iowa Department of Natural Resources, https://www.iowadnr.gov/Places-to-Go/State-Parks/Iowa-State-Parks/Maquoketa-Caves-State-Park. 2023 Mar. 23.