The name is literal. Skeleton Cave is a lava tube on the northern flank of Newberry Volcano near Bend, somewhere between 75,000 and 400,000 years old, and its skylight entrance worked for millennia as a natural trap. Animals fell in and could not climb out.
What came out of the floor is a roll call of Pleistocene Oregon: a short faced bear of the genus Arctodus, a dire wolf nearly the size of a modern northwestern grey wolf, a horse identified as Equus niobrarensis, elk, deer, lynx, arctic fox, two kinds of grey fox, a large hyena like dog, a marten sized carnivore, and a bear reported at the time as at least a third larger than any living species. Phil Brogan, who saw the quantity of bone scattered through it, gave the cave its current name; it had earlier been called Bone Cave.
Not everyone agreed about how the bones arrived. Dr James Gidley of the National Museum argued they must have fallen in through earthquake cracks in the ceiling, on the reasoning that no animal would crawl that far into a cave to die. The trap explanation has held up better.
Settlers documented the cave around 1924, but a stick found inside carried pencil markings dated 1894, and on what may have been the same visit somebody found an illegal moonshiner's still down there. Walter Perry and Phil Brogan later surveyed it by compass and pace at 3,036 feet.
It is a well preserved tube with little interior collapse, its walls, ceiling and floor showing ropy pahoehoe flow structure, part of the same flow as nearby Boyd Cave. It is unlit and cold year round, and it is closed year-round: the Deschutes National Forest Cave Resource Protection Order (06-01-26-02, in force from April 1, 2026 to April 2, 2031) bars entering the cave at any time to protect hibernating bats, and bans climbing or bouldering inside or outside the gate from September 15 to April 30.
Not a permit proposition and not a walk-up: the gate stays shut.
Other places on the map within a couple of hours.
