Lava Beds National Monument Bingo

Count the caves opening off the two-mile loop road, then pick a few to climb into.

Climb down into Skull Cave, a giant tube with a floor of ice at the very bottom.

Look on cool cave walls or near entrances at dusk for a small bat with giant curled ears.

Its ears are almost as long as its body. When the bat rests or gets cold, it curls those giant ears back over its shoulders like coiled ram's horns, and unrolls them to listen when it wakes.

Explore Valentine Cave, one of the smoothest, easiest tubes to walk end to end.

In Golden Dome, shine your light on the ceiling and watch tiny drops glow gold.

A rare low-elevation pika here. Listen for a bleat among the cool, collapsed lava tubes.

A pika does not hibernate. Instead it spends all summer clipping plants and piling them under rocks to dry into haypiles, then eats from those piles all winter under the snow.

Some caves stay so cold they hold ice all year. Find one still frozen in summer.

Watch the sagebrush and juniper flats at dawn and dusk for browsing mule deer.

Mule deer are named for their ears, which are about three-quarters as long as their whole head. Those big ears catch faraway sounds and also let heat escape to keep the deer cool in the desert.

Find Canby's Cross, where the Modoc leader Kintpuash killed a U.S. general during peace talks in 1873.

Hike the short, steep trail up Schonchin Butte to the old fire lookout above the lava country.

In winter, scan tall snags and the Tule Lake basin edges for bald eagles.

A bald eagle's nest is the biggest tree nest in the world. A pair adds sticks year after year until the nest can weigh a ton or more, as heavy as a small car.

Peer down Fleener Chimneys, deep vents where lava once threw blobs of rock into the air.

Learn to tell aa, sharp and chunky lava, from pahoehoe, smooth and ropy. Find both.

Start at Mushpot Cave by the visitor center, the only lit cave, and read how the tube formed.

On a summer evening, watch bats stream out of a cave mouth to hunt bugs in the dusk.

Borrow a bump helmet and a flashlight at the visitor center before you crawl into a low cave.

Enter at one marker and come out another, with a headlamp for the dark stretch.

The caving rule here: carry three sources of light. Check all of yours before you go under.

Photograph the carvings cut high on the cliff, where Tule Lake once came up to meet them.

Shine your beam up and photograph the frozen ripples in the roof of a tube.

Scan the Tule Lake refuge just outside for huge flocks of geese and ducks in fall.

Walk the lava fortress where Kintpuash's Modoc band held out in the winter of 1872 to 1873.

Notice the air turn cold as you step down out of the sun into a lava tube.

There's no water for sale inside the monument, so top off before you drive in.