The river Styx runs through it

If there was a list of places to see and experience in Oregon before you croak -- it would no doubt include the usual suspects: Crater Lake, Hells Canyon, Mount Hood, the Columbia River Gorge, the entire coast. Yet we'd like to add a few you might not have thought of, such as the intriguingly named River Styx.

The sound of rushing water, one of the most soothing in nature, seems to come from everywhere in the surrounding woods and nowhere at once. Until you see the pristine stream gushing through a wall of ferns and woodland wildflowers as it cascades into a glassy pond.

It is a scene out of a fairy tale: Across the road sits the rustic Oregon Caves Chateau, a country cousin to the grander Timberline and Crater Lake lodges, and off to the side is the chalet entrance to the Oregon Caves National Monument.

What's the fuss about a mountain stream when Oregon's forests are full of them?

Plenty, when you realize that what you see is only a part of the story, the private face of an otherwise reclusive river.

Outside the Oregon Caves, an hour's drive from Grants Pass, the stream is blandly referred to as Cave Creek. Inside, where the water has carved formations that make you feel like you're walking through the belly of the whale, Cave Creek becomes the River Styx, named for the border between the Earth and the Underworld in Greek mythology.

But why put the River Styx on our Oregon bucket list?

Because it's the very force that created the intrinsically interesting Oregon Caves, and because the river may soon become the first underground stream in the nation to be protected by Congress as "wild and scenic."

Besides that, can you name another river in Oregon that meanders through a six-story chateau (it literally separates the dining room from the gift shop)? It then flows back outside and down the mountain, eventually meets up with the Illinois and Rogue rivers, and finally pours into the Pacific Ocean.

The real curiosity of the River Styx, though, lies inside the tunnels and caverns it created when it breached the surface thousands of years ago. There, temperatures hover in the low 40s, and a 75-minute tour requires warm clothes, strong legs and the ability to climb more than 500 stairs.

To understand why the U.S. National Park Service wants the wild and scenic designation -- part of more than 2 million acres of wilderness, including 132,000 acres in the Mount Hood National Forest, likely to be protected with legislation this year -- follow a ranger inside the caves on a warm summer day. The cool air immediately chills the skin as daylight fades to near darkness and the walls gather around you like a closing fist. The somnolent gurgle of the river drowns most other sounds.

This must have been how 24-year-old Elijah Davidson, the hunter who discovered the caves in 1874, found it when he ran inside after his dog, Bruno, who had darted in to chase a bear.

Davidson was deep inside the pitch black when his last match went out. He might have died in the caves if he hadn't kept his wits and followed the icy River Styx back outside to the land of the living.

How exactly the river has changed since Davidson first saw it is a mystery that scientists only in the last 10 to 15 years have begun to unravel, says John Roth, natural resources specialist with the National Park Service. One thing that is changing, however, is the way society views the river and encircling caves.

"Greeks and Native Americans saw caves as sources of spiritual and religious power," Roth says, citing the river's name as proof. "Only in Roman times did caves acquire a bad reputation, along with everything else underground. Think of phrases like 'feeling high' and 'the bottom of the heap'; everything below was thought of as bad. Only in the last 100 years or so have we changed our view to see caves as once again sacred places and therefore worthy of protection."

The caves, as Davidson saw them, began to transform after President Taft proclaimed the site a national monument in 1909. Public tours took off after the chateau -- built to attract tourists to the remote location in the Siskiyou National Forest -- was constructed in 1934. In time, algae grew around the lights installed along walkways and turned some walls and formations green. Other formations and features turned black from people touching them in the days when visitors freely broke off stalactites as souvenirs, held parties in some of the rooms, even a ballroom dance and a wedding ceremony once.

Today, visitors are forbidden from touching anything and from bringing in anything more than a camera. Rangers, who have installed networks of plastic sheets under walkways and stairs to collect thousands of pounds of lint dropped from clothes and tracked in on shoes, are studying ways to clean the caves without disrupting the natural formations.

Fluorescent light bulbs are being replaced with diodes. And more than 1,500 tons of rubble, dynamited during the 1930s and shoveled into side caverns, was removed in the 1980s. At one time, Roth says, the river was so buried in debris that you couldn't hear it inside the caves. Even the asphalt laid for paths has been taken out and replaced with more environmentally sensitive materials.

The "wild and scenic" status won't do much directly to protect the river further, he says. But it would increase the size of the monument from 480 acres to more than 4,000, which would allow the Park Service to pursue larger grants that could pay for more extensive studies of the caves and the river.

The protection also would bring more attention to the monument at a time when attendance at most national parks is down. The river is cursed by the double-edged sword of its ruggedly beautiful location. It is in such a remote pocket of the state that phone service to the monument was down for nearly six months recently after thieves stole more than a mile of telephone cable in November. Installation of a new phone system was hampered by heavy winter snow.

"We want you to take away the appreciation that this is a special place," Roth says, "because if you don't, the American public will lose it."

Larry Bingham: 503-221-8262; larrybingham@news.oregonian.com