Some things to note:
1) This is a 2+ hour drive each way!!!
2) There is 7½ miles of dirt/sand/wash to drive (so AWD/4WD/high clearance is recommended)
3) This is likely the last desert hike for this season, we have a cool weekend and temperatures should have a high of 66-67F
4) You can also carpool from Los Coches, but will have to plan it yourselves...
So, my plan for carpooling is LEAVING at 7am on Saturday from the Scripps Poway Park and Ride off I-15 at 12016 Scripps Highlands Dr, San Diego, CA 92131. Then we drive through Ramona, to stop at the Chase Bank in Ramona at 7:30 to pick up anyone who is carpooling from there. Then driving the 1hr 45 min (68 miles) to park near the first mud cave entrance located at 32.92605, -116.19090 (to arrive by 9:15-9:20am) and start the hike at 9:30am...
From there, we enter the canyon and go through Chasm cave, we will pass the entrance to E-ticket Cave to get to end of Chasm Canyon, then we will loop back to enter E-ticket
Now if you have any fears of tight places, E-Ticket cave may not be the best cave to explore. It's a 583 feet long series of tiny winding passages that require getting on your hands and knees to negotiate much of the dark, narrow, twisting route.
I have a "potential" route around e-ticket cave if people don't want to go through it from the end of Chasm Canyon, but it's a theory until we get there and see it. After exiting E-ticket, we walk across the ridge to drop into the entrance to Oxbow cave, passing through skylight cave, before entering Carey’s, which has ceilings reaching 70 feet high, then we exit back out and we've finished our 1.6 mile loop of caves.
Then we can either walk ⅓ mile to the next loop of caves/canyons, or we can move the car(s).
We then will visit Plunge Pool Cave, and then go through Big Mud Cave, exploring our way back through the canyon wash until we double back to footprint cave. After Footprint cave we then exit down into the main wash crossing over into Mudflow Cave and Mudflow Canyon, we then explore both ends of Rubble Canyon as we make our way back to the main wash to return to the entrance to our loop after 2.2 miles. If we haven't moved the car(s) it's a ⅓ mile walk back to the car(s).
I made a map of the route with write up descriptions of the caves -
https://caltopo.com/m/6N8PU1D
There are more caves on the map, but not sure we'll have time to do more.
I expect we'll take 3-3 ½ hours to do the 4 miles of exploring/lunch break. So, by 1:30-2pm we start heading back to civilization...
I hope to be back to Ramona by 4pm? Scripps/Poway by 4:30pm?
