MINI-EXPLORERS IN THE CETATEA RĂDESEI CAVE, FROM THE APUSENI MOUNTAINS ROMANIA

The cheerful group of parents and children woke up early in the morning with the desire for another beautiful hike in the heart of the Apuseni Mountains, although it had been fierce the night before. Well, more of us, the parents, we broke into talents on the disco rhythms of our youth (Modern Talking, CC Catch, Boney M, Richi e Poveri, Albano etc), the children looking at us in amazement and retiring. for privacy and theirs in the billiard room. Good thing we didn't dislocate something damn… 😀

So slightly wrinkled after the ad-hoc party, we woke up, had breakfast and left quite cheerfully with the cars to the Vărășoaia glade.

We left the impeccable asphalt that leads to Padis and we walked until almost the beginning of the route about 5km on a pretty ok macadam, which can be penetrated by a car with a lower ground clearance, if it is driven carefully.

We left the cars on the side of the road, equipped ourselves and left for the entrance point to the cave.

A few hundred meters on the forest road and then through the forest… I at the tail of the group, as is my habit…

… With my eyes rolling around me and I saw mushrooms but I also tasted some raspberries…

… Everything in a rather fierce and wild scene…

… And I walked like that for about 20 minutes, until I came across the bed of the Rădeasa brook, from where I took it directly on its wire.

Hopping on a rock, more on logs, balance and increased attention so as not to slip and take water on board from the beginning.

… Over some slippery logs…

Mission accomplished, the whole group arrived safely at the mouth of the cave… Portal…

Delight and excitement, we enter a completely different world, for the first time for most of the group… And how impressive everything looked, an entrance portal with a height of almost 15 meters…

Moments of posing, many pictures were taken with everything we saw around us.

… And the natural frame of an authentic autumn painting….

V., the leader and organizer of the trip, had warned us the night before - we go, we enter, we see the first threshold to descend and each decides whether to go forward through the penetrating darkness of the cave or go out and bypass the mountain on the outer route.

That's how we curious looked at the first threshold to go down, with a height of about 2 meters but equipped with chains. Hehe, was that why we were scared? About this little thing?

So… "come on, put your foot in there, your left in there, put your back there… put your hand in there… so… goodbye!"

Encouragement urges for each, in turn, plus the necessary assessments from the group for a successful descent!

Well, I think they were about 3 meters away…

The first ones came down the most experienced, to help the most helpless, that is, children, women, the elderly and… me… I'm kidding, I did better than I would have thought, despite the oversized size.

But I had no idea that this first threshold would actually be the easiest of the next two, plus the last one at the exit of the cave, where we all got wet…

One by one, we all went down to the first room of the cave

… And we started to look around and explore, each where he had the mood and courage, because the walls and the floor of the cave were slippery, at any step risking reaching with your legs up and, in the happiest case, with poponeața in cold water…

Easy and very carefully where I put my feet I advanced under the chimneys of the cave, some of them even hanging the logs brought by the fiery element that haunts these mountains at winter time…

… What a roar it will be in the cave when the wind blows hard through the chimneys in its ceiling… What will it be like to sit there and listen to the symphony of unleashed nature? I think scary

Then I reached another threshold, a little harder to cross because of the damp and extremely slippery walls…

… Which I passed, some with wetter feet than they had at the entrance to the cave… because the water passed at the base of that threshold, fast and cold…

Finally, see the light at the end of the cave

But our amateur-speleological adventure was not over yet… because the water was getting deeper, the riverbed occupying from there all the space between the vertical walls, with slippery edges on the edges where you could practically not keep your foot…

… Despite the chains attached to the walls, you could not put your foot on something stable to avoid cold water… so, the inevitable happened for the entire expeditionary corps, including the most experienced, some of them claiming that they were pushed 😀

… To the already too difficult equation for some of us, were added the slippery logs sprinkled here and there by alluvium… put there to confuse, not to help…

… Moreover, at the last threshold we also got wet at the hips, because it could only go down if you let yourself down and… guess… when you did it, you had to get wet in your panties

… But nah, I laughed heartily when we got wet but more habitually when I saw the others suffer the same… how funny it was… NO…

For the last crossing of the water to be a very good beam for balancing exercises, worthy only of gymnasts or gymnasts… Well, with emotions and a lot of swings I passed… mother how my knees shook there, on that damn log… that there was no one to give me a helping hand…

And here we are all coming out of the Cetatea Rădesei cave, all wet, more or less, as each of us had come in contact with water.

That's why, for cases like this, it's good to have another pair of dry socks and bags with you on the mountain. Change socks, put your feet in bags and then in wet boots / boots

Use but delight in our experience as mini-explorers, a premiere for most of the group…

So, delighted with what we had just done, we tactfully sat on the boulders and stones, in the sun, took our feet out of our wet boots, satiated our socks insatiably, whoever had them and changed them and the lucky ones -they protected the dry ones with bags…

No, I didn't take her underwear to dry… 😀

For half an hour we took a deep breath, ate something, drank something refreshing, normal.

Of course, I do not recommend crossing the cave without an experienced guide and without proper equipment (fronts, boots or tight-fitting shoes, waterproof or easy-to-dry clothing, and even a helmet would be preferable). Moreover, the leader of our group was prepared with harnesses and rope for the eventual assurance of the most clumsy when descending the higher thresholds.

For us, it took us 90 minutes to cross it. That's because we were a pretty big group and we expected and helped each other.

And because we were not tired of adventure, we told ourselves to do the Someșul Cald Circuit…

… Despite the warnings at the entrance to the route.

We advanced almost 90 minutes up the top of the mountain, through a forest practically destroyed by storms, with dozens of fir trunks and trees uprooted by impressive forces from the ground.

Only about 33 of them lay right on the trail, so you kind of realize what torments I went through, with my tonnage, to get over them, even under them… But after the 90 minutes of Golgotha in the dense forest , we decided to go back because we realized that we could not do the desired circuit without being caught at night in the woods.

33, yes, I counted them… I was curious too… 33 took him, also 33 returned him, because no one had moved them in the meantime.

If I was the last one to take him to the shower, with a small grin on my lips, on the way back I was the first, because I couldn't wait to get out of there unscathed… Sucker is the one who enters a forbidden route…

So, back at the exit of the cave, from where I climbed on chains on the detour and external route, under the open sky, on the dry path, to the Vărășoaia glade, where I had left the cars.

It took about an hour to return, with ups and downs, some harder others only at the level of a path through the forest. But up on the top of the mountain, practically above the cave, we were saddened by the desolate landscape, as if apocalyptic…

Of course I passed the mouth of the Radesa Fortress cave again. And we said goodbye to her…

Actually route through the Rădesei Fortress Cave

The starting point of the route is in Poiana Vărășoaia, where it can be reached quite easily by car, on a macadam road
Duration of the circuit route Cetatea Rădesei Cave - to the cave 20 minutes, through the cave 90 minutes, break of 30 minutes, return on the external route 60 minutes. Total 200 minutes, ie at least 3 hours for amateur tourists like us.
A more compact group will finish the route faster
Marking - Red dot
Difficulty - Difficult route, not recommended for beginners and inexperienced tourists in the mountains and especially in caves. Really forbidden, I would say without an experienced guide.
Necessarily waterproof equipment, boots with tight soles, headlamps or flashlights, possibly headphones.
The entire underground route measures approximately 212m, to which is added 47 meters of canyon.

Unfortunately, I could not record the route with the clock, because in the underground I did not have GPS and orientation.

What's more, the route through the Rădesei Fortress Cave was a wonderful experience from my point of view, although it wasn't exactly easy. But with experienced people to guide you, everything seems much easier than it really is in reality.

The peak, although we came in dry and came out wet, we were overjoyed by our amateur adventure, of lovers of mountains and movement in the heart of nature.

The full image gallery below.