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‘Don’t worry,’ my sister said as she slipped off of her pants. ‘Where we are going, you don’t need your clothes.’ She casually piled her remaining garments inside the bunkhouse room before tightening the laces on her hiking shoes, checking the batteries in her flashlight, and heading towards the trailhead. I took her at her word and followed , forgoing clothing for a water bottle and sunscreen. We hurried towards the Welcome Center, we needed to be at the trailhead an hour before dusk. While the trail is open to the public, it is often recommended along with a warning. The trail starts in Valley View Hot Springs, which is clothing-optional. Therefore, most of the people on the trail, including my sister and I, have opted to be as close as possible can be to nature. We gather behind the camp host and make our way along the trail. Stretched cat-like along the eastern edge of the San Luis Valley, the Sangre de Christo mountains head North - South through southern Colorado. As we walk North along the ridge, the entire horizon throbs red; there is a reason the range’s name means ‘the blood of Christ’. Everywhere is stained ruddy with traces of iron ore. After half an hour of walking brings us to our half-way point. The mining town of Orient has been abandoned for almost a century, long enough to no longer appears on any maps. The men came here to take the blood-red ore from the mountains and all that remains are cracked foundations, rusty scrap metal, and large ocher-colored mounds of mining slag. Like all abandoned things, the town draws you in only to disappoint with unanswered question. We pause momentarily for sips of water before we are driven on by the oppressive heat and marauding bands of mosquitoes. We branch off of the main trail and head uphill. ‘Stay on the trail,’ we are warned, the old mine shafts are uncharted, unstable, and all around us. We smell it first: a cold breeze that would be refreshing if it did not smell of decay. The smell grows stronger as the trail levels out and then suddenly ends at the edge of a black void in the mountains side. We are here. This hole in the earth represents just the tip of an iceberg of space carved out of the mountain. Part of a large cavern and mining complex that collapsed a hundred years ago and opened up the body of the mountain to new visitors. The cavern exhales over us as we wait in the growing darkness. It starts first as a trickle: a tiny breeze against the side of your face. A small sound evolving into a growling rumble until we all look up to see a black torrent spooling away from the cavern and into the air. A waterless flood of twisting leathery wings. For half an hour, as they fly over, around, and past us: a quarter of a million Mexican free-tailed bats flowing out over the flatness of the valley. The only sounds the flapping of soft bodies and the edges of squeals mostly too high for us to hear. We watch until they slow to a trickle, until they are lost to our feeble eyes in the night We wait, breathless, until someone switches on a flashlight and we silently pick our way back past Orient’s bones and to the warmth of the mountains hot springs. Later that night we can see them in the moonlight swooping to catch the night-time insects, as we soak under the open sky.