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Today was looking like an absolutely spectacular day to be outside, sun shining, air clean, roads clear—clear enough to be pulled over on Highway 385 for getting distracted by the beautiful day—warnings issued… It was a shame that I’d be spending most of it underground, but at this time of year, the roads going to most of the places I wanted to see were closed anyway. Luckily, my destinations today are open year-round, starting with Jewel Cave National Monument!
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Like many caves, this one was well known by the ancestors of the Sioux thousands of years ago, though only through the wind escaping small openings. In 1900, Frank and Albert Michaud blew one of these openings out with dynamite and began their underground explorations! Discovering huge crystals, they put down a mining claim. Discovering those crystals were made of calcite, they turned it into a tourist destination. Discovering tourists weren’t willing to make the long trek to see the cave, they went out of business. Luckily for the cave, President Roosevelt declared it a national monument in 1908—the first cave with the title—and today, it’s more accessible than ever! My elevator descended promptly at 9:00 AM to begin the Scenic Tour!
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It was just me, an older couple, and the ranger on this tour, which made it easy to hear! We entered a huge, open room called the Target Room and learned that this cave started forming when it was under the sea, around 360 million years ago! As the sea water ebbed and flowed, fresh water and sandstone entered, creating and filling voids in the limestone. Starting at the end of the Cretaceous Period, the Black Hills rose up, and more fresh water flowed in, creating the world’s fifth longest known cave system over 60 million years! I asked the ranger about a green patch up on the ceiling, and she said that was just algae, which grows around the lights and has to be cleaned every so often! I wondered how the heck algae spores even got down here to begin with!
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Algae can spread on shoes, on clothes, and with the wind! Wind there was indeed! It wasn’t something that could be felt as we descended the first long staircase, but we could tell that it was circulating because we could all breathe! Unlike other big caves, this one gets its air from only two natural entrances!
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Then we came to our first big crystal panel! It looked kind of like a wool car seat liner, but it was actually thousands of pointy calcite crystals called nailhead spar! These are the “jewels” that give this cave its name, and they formed way back when the cave was fully underwater!
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We descended even further, into huge corridors of these crystal cushions, and the ranger told us that, while some of these passages are narrow, they’re nothing like a stretch outside the normal tour route called the Miseries! That’s an 1,100-foot long stretch where spelunkers have to crawl on their belly, and that’s just to get going on their explorations!
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We were going to get more information on exploration in a minute, but first, we’d reached the Formations Room, home to more magnificent spar galleries but also classic speleothems like flowstone and soda straws! This was where, like on every cave tour, the lights went out to show everyone just how dark it could get and how little there was to see when the Michaud brothers first started giving cave tours by candlelight!
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As we pressed on, the ranger told us more about how the majority of cave exploration is done! In 1959, the cave hooked two professional rock climbers into the underground. They were Herb and Jan Conn (Jan being the first woman to climb Devils Tower), and they immediately fell in love with navigating and charting the inside of this cave! For the next twenty years, they mapped 62.36 miles of Jewel Cave, including the very route we were taking today!
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By Herb’s barometric pressure calculations, though, over 95% of the cave system remains to be explored, and folks are still charting new territory today! The ranger said that the National Park Service organizes volunteer groups to go exploring for four days at a time! Yup, four days underground! The base camp for these expeditions is at a place called the Big Duh, which is five miles into the cave from the elevator! Most caves are explorable for about seven miles, but Jewel Cave keeps on going! While it’s not an easy cave, it doesn’t have the treacherous drops or seasonal floods of some other caves, making it difficult but relatively safe. Of course, everything packed in has to be packed out, and new routes must be navigated by small numbered tags attached to boulders!
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Speaking of boulders, the ranger showed off one boulder that was covered with black! This was manganese oxide, the same stuff that leaves streaks down the cliffs at Lake Powell! It’s a clean freak’s worst nightmare! While it’s slippery, making it harder for cavers to get traction, it also rubs off easily, getting all over! Manganese is very hard to wash off, and it’s also flammable! I asked the ranger if there’d been any surprise booms in the candle days, but she said it fizzles more than explodes. That was a relief!
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Folks join these strenuous, messy expeditions for the chance to see places that have never been seen before, because there’s never been light there before! Plus, when they’re the first person to see a place or a formation, they get dibs on naming it! That’s how the cave got names like the Snowblower, the Humdinger, Hurricane Corner, and Funny Little Hole! If I didn’t have anywhere else to be on this tour, I think it would be kind of cool to go off in search of places that have never been seen before. What might I name such a place?!
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We finished our tour in the Torture Room, named by Mrs. Conn because from here, you could hear, but not locate, the distant drip of water! We learned that Mrs. Conn, to this day, still monitors new caving explorations by phone, as both a safety procedure and just to hear all about new discoveries! She’s quoted as saying, “If people do what they really want to do, then they will eventually contribute something to the world.”
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Then, this first tour of the day concluded, bringing us back up to the surface, where I had to decide how best to fill the few hours between this tour and the next. A good museum ought to do the trick, so I headed south to the town of Hot Springs, where I was not going to have time for a dip but at least get a chance to see some amazing things that also came up from underground: mammoth fossils!
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Between 60 and 70 thousand years ago, Columbian mammoths ranged all across the continent, from as far north as the Dakotas to as far south as Costa Rica! They were huge, stretching up to 13 feet at the shoulder and weighing nearly 11 tons!
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This is the largest discovery of Columbian mammoth fossils in the whole world! Since 1974, when the first seven-foot tusk came up while grading for a housing development, 61 mammoths have been uncovered here at the Hot Springs Mammoth Site (compared to 25 found at Waco Mammoth National Monument and 36 found at Rancho La Brea)! Unlike many sites around the world, this one has been kept in situ, but the arrangement of these well preserved fossils is iconic!
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How the heck did they all get here, you might wonder? Well, similarly to the Tar Pits at La Brea, this was a trap for thirsty animals! Unlike La Brea, all the critters who tell in here weren’t stuck in sticky tar. Fossils go down 65 feet, indicating that this was once a sinkhole with a sudden, steep drop-off. Critters who were nibbling water plants could easily slip on the Spearfish shale lining the edges and fall into the depths, unable to get enough footing to haul themselves out again! 85 other species found here appear to have made the same mistake!
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Not about to sink into a trap myself (a time trap), I only got about 45 minutes to marvel at the Mammoth Site because my next appointment was rapidly approaching, a second cave tour! The Black Hills are home to not one, but two caves protected by the National Park Service, and I was lined up for the 1:00 Fairgrounds Tour at ominous-sounding Wind Cave National Park!
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Before I even got underground, there was plenty of history to discover. The visitor center is part of the Nationally Registered Wind Cave National Park Administrative and Utility Area Historic District, a real mouthful! These residences, administration buildings, and mess hall were built in the 1930s by the Civilian Conservation Corps, reflecting National Park Service Rustic Style, which blends with the landscape. Can you tell?
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These structures centered around the entrance blasted into the rock, first in 1881 and again in 1936, but the original, natural entrance to Wind Cave, like Jewel Cave, was scarcely large enough for someone to squeeze inside! The Lakota saw this as the place where life first emerged onto the surface of the world! Those who came up too early found it a harsh and dangerous place, and they were turned into buffalo to endure it. When it was safe, Tokahe led the first humans of the Pte Oyate (buffalo nation) to the surface, and when they saw that the Black Hills were in the shape of a buffalo, they knew they would be forever linked to their formidable forbears!
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Today, folks come here to do the opposite of emerge, taking a peek back into the misty myths of time and one of the world’s rarest cave formations, called boxwork, which I will detail a little later.
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The elevators at Wind Cave were much smaller than at Jewel Cave and much less modern! The cave was closed for months last year when the elevators were getting repaired, as was the case in 2021, 2020, 2019… There’s even talk of refurbishing them again this year! Long story short, it took three trips to get the whole group down into the cave! Once we were all gathered in the Assembly Room, the ranger looked to me to play the role of caboose and keep everyone on the train!
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Like Jewel Cave, Wind Cave was first popularized by two brothers, Tom and Jesse Bingham, who’d ridden by in 1881 and felt a huge gust of wind coming out of the ground! They were quick to share the spectacle, and within the year, Charlie Crary made the first descent into the cave! By 1890, the family of Jessie and Lucy McDonald had settled here, found the cave entrance, and decided to develop it as a tourist attraction they called, you guessed it, Wind Cave!
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Of the McDonalds, 16-year old Alvin was the most excited about Wind Cave! He was the first guide, and he kept a detailed journal of his three years of adventures in the cave, in which he mapped the first 8 to 10 miles of it! All of this was done by candlelight, unrolling string as he went in order to pull himself out again. Some of the places he wrote about weren’t explored again until the 21st Century, when his signature was found on the wall of a room that no one was supposed to have explored before! Sadly, he met a tragic end, not in the cave but at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where he caught typhoid while promoting the cave. His final resting place is near the cave he loved!
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Alvin McDonald gave the name to this cave’s signature formation—boxwork—and to the room where most of it was found—the Post Office! Boxwork is formed from thin blades of calcite that intersect each other in a pattern of “boxes,” but how exactly those “boxes” form is a mystery! Like Jewel Cave, this was underwater around 350 million years ago, and the seafloor solidified into two kinds of calcium deposit: limestone and gypsum! Very soft, the gypsum that squeezed into cracks in the limestone wore away easily and was replaced with calcite, which was more resilient than the limestone! After eons, the limestone wore away to reveal these calcite boxes, and Wind Cave has the most of this unique formation in the entire world!
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I couldn’t help but notice as we walked just how dry this cave was! The rock overhead isn’t as permeable as in some caves, and the water that does get in was at the water table, more than two hundred feet below us! Add constantly flowing, dry wind, and it meant we weren’t likely to see many stalactites or stalagmites. The boxwork would have to do!
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There were some thin patches on our tour route, as well as some long stretches where the taller folks had to bend down so they wouldn’t bash their noggins on that impermeable rock! I took the liberty, as caboose, to play with some of the fun lighting and curves of the path while folks were navigating up ahead.
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Just like in Jewel Cave, there seems to always be more of Wind Cave to explore! Starting with the National Speleological Society’s official expedition in 1959, this has become a big meeting place for Grottos from Colorado, the Dakotas, and Chicago! Herb and Jan Conn even broke away from Jewel Cave for a bit and discovered the first lake in the cave (Calcite Lake) and a huge space called the Club Room!
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Unlike the Conns, I was ready to get back up to the surface. I realized that this was going to be my last cave on this national park quest, and good thing too! White-nose syndrome has been found in this cave, and I sure don’t want to go spreading that to any vulnerable bats! The fungus has done enough damage already!
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Back up top, I began my gradual return to Rapid City, stopping to see some spots of historical interest along the way. Naturally, I had to stop and see the Beaver Creek Bridge, built in 1929 to connect Wind Cave National Park to Custer State Park in the north. This bridge creates the illusion that it extends naturally out of the rock on either side, the only one of its kind in South Dakota and one of only three in all of the Rocky Mountains!
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A jaunt to the left of the main road, where the dirt mixed with ice, was the Cold Springs School House, one of South Dakota’s oldest log buildings, standing since 1887! For the small community of Cold Springs, this not only served as a school for the young’uns, but also a dance hall, meeting house, and church! It had a strong run until a catastrophic blizzard in 1949 shuttered it for good.
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Speaking of snow, I found a few patches on the school lawn and remembered that I hadn’t seen Señor Castorieti in almost four years! The snowbeaver was elated to be back up and frolicking once again. Looking all around, he asked where we were, and I told him. He asked when we were, and I told him. “This is January in South Dakota!” he exclaimed, promptly falling backwards off the railing to his demise! Poor Señor Castorieti. I’ll have to summon him back when I find more snow.
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That day of more snow just might be tomorrow! As I was eastbound yesterday, there was a lot more snow in central South Dakota than in the west, and my destination for tomorrow is in just such a snowy region: Badlands National Park! That should give me a much better opportunity to have a real chat with Señor Castorieti and give my nervous friend a little peace!
Cave a good one!
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Total Ground Covered: 592.0 mi (952.7 km) |
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