After hiking Ape Cave last year with my daughter and loving it, we put together a trip with some old friends from out of town and did it again this year with a group of eight (including a 4-year-old). This is a hike that feels like a once in a lifetime experience, and I feel incredibly fortunate to have done it twice.
We got to the trailhead at 7:30 am on a Saturday, met one other person heading in (who we never saw again), and were passed by two other spelunkers about halfway through the tube. Apart from that, we didn't see another person until we exited via the ladder and started bumping into incoming hikers on the trail.
Getting there early is absolutely the way to do this. It took us about 2:15 to hike the 1.5-mile route, plus another 45 minutes to do the surface trail back, and when we returned to the trailhead the parking lot was full, the overflow lot was mostly or entirely full, and there were people parked along the road.
A cave is one of the few places you can experience true darkness (and true silence, although Ape Cave is drippy enough that we never found that in this one), and that plus the solitude of being with your little team of fellow humans -- and no one else -- in a place as special as Ape Cave is truly marvelous.
The cave was exactly as I remembered it, the experience with a larger group was a ton of fun (quite different from doing it as a twosome, but in a good way; both are enjoyable), and I would love to do this hike every year.
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