Snake Cave
 Of 50 researched cavities of fore-mountains Snake Cave is the longest. It is 320 m long and natives asure that it is still lonter. The cave is 10 km south from Simferopol almost at the center of water-separating site of Internal Ridge, limited by the valleys of Alma River to the west and Western Bulganak to the east. Ridge slopes are from 5 to 40 m high and are compiled of limestone, partitioned with ravines and holes to separate rocky capes. And in one of them - Battery Cape - Snake Cave is situated.   The road to it starts at Chistenkoye village 8 km from Simferopolol on Sebastopol highway. Behind multi-story buildings at the end of the street you should turn left onto a country road. You'd better take water in a poultry farm standing separately - there is no water near the cave. There is a fork on a marge of the wood: the left way goes down to the feet of Internal Ridge, and the right one straight up to the cave through woods serving as a rest-zone for Simferopol dwellers. Close to a steep slope of the ridge the road turns westward and leads to a pine-tree grove on Battery Cape. From here we go down along the path to the feet of this 30 m steep. Where the steep is dissected by V-shaped crevice, at the upper part of it, there is the entrance into Snake Cave. While going down the entrance is not seen neither from above nor from below. It is seen after you climb upon the crevice.
  The size of the entrance amazes. It has a form of a mushroom; the height is 11 m, width is 5 m. There is an arch above the head; it has twisting crack in the center which is wide at the beginning and gradually narrowing in the depth. One more arch is seen through it. Two floors are well defined within the entrance, but there are three floors altogather (this is a very rare phenomenon with the cavities of fore-mountain Crimea). The first and second floors of the cave are seen well and fragments of the third remained only at the beginning of the cave. A flat block lies here looking like a table. If you climb upon it you may enter the third floor through the crack. By width and height it concedes to the second floor but has several sideways. They are twisting and often intersect one another making little widenings in places of connection. Holes are half-filled with dry red-color clay. Daylight grows dim 15 m from the entrance. Here the second and the third floors converge into one gallery because interfloor covers are destroyed by a steep. Therefore the height of the pass grows sharply up to 5-7 meters.
  Soon the gallery makes a knee-shaped turn. Within its limits near to the right wall there is a hole 0.5 m wide on the floor. This is the entrance into a well 3.5 meters deep leading to the first floor. The well has a trick - it widens like a flask on the first meter. So you'd better go down it along one of its walls.
  The well devides the first floor into two unequal parts. The short one is directed to the exit and goes under the second floor using intersecting parallel cracks. The pass is high but so narrow that you can only creep on your side. At the dead end of it there is an expansion, and its walls and arch are covered with pure and clean calcite crystals. The second way, leading from the well deep into the cave, is much wider and higher than the first one. There are half-filled holes on its floor - they are traces of arheological deepenings.
  After we walk 20 meters from the well by the lower path we get to the main gallery. The gallery is twisting and there are ledges of limestones on its turns. They look like single blocks because they have crack-looking holes from three sides. In some places very narrow passes may force you climb onto huge stones and come down from them. Stone piles in gallery expansions are covered with a layer of reddish clay.
  Treading on inclined plate we go down into a minute underground gorge (it's height is up to 10 m, width at the floor level is 2,5 m), and at its beginning there is a passable crack leading to a side path. Traces of former watering of the cave remained on its walls covered with small calcite colors. An underground lake existed here for a long time and its level lowered three times - there are fragments of horizontal lines. We can judge about the depth of the lake by their height above the floor: 2 m, 1,8 m and 1 m. There is a thick layer of thin clay remained after it on the floor.
  There is a narrow pass behind the crevice and it leads to a hall with big blocks of stone. Many think it to be the end of the cave because it is very hard to find its continuation. There are holes between stone fragments and they create impression of convenient passes but in reality they are wide cracks between uncemented blocks of stone. There are two passes to a dead end. One of them is at the very entrance into a hall with stones, and another is in it's right corner. They both lead into a wide gallery more than 4 meters high with a chain of stallactites on its arch. No way from here. In order to find the way out you should follow the former path.
 

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