National Park Caves

I didn't have a chance to blog about our visit to Jewel Cave on Thursday.  Dave and I don't usually have a chance to go on cave tours, but Jewel Cave is a national monument and offered the Discovery Talk, a 20-minute wheelchair accessible tour,  which was free to America the Beautiful pass holders and up to three guests. 

First we visited the Jewel Cave historic area, which didn't amount to much except an old log cabin built by the CCC employees and was used as the visitor's center until the new center was built.

As we were exploring the cabin, a park ranger appeared and asked us if we were there for the lantern cave tour.  It turned out that the lantern tour is Jewel Cave's most strenuous cave tour.  No, we weren't there for that!

Kids and some brave young adults proved they were skinny enough for one of the tours by crawling through this tight space. When we got to the (new) visitor's center, we signed up for the Discovery cave tour.

We took an elevator down over 200 feet to get to the cave and then walked into a fairly open space of the cave. 

Ranger Ken guided us on this tour. 

We saw calcite crystals called dogtooth and nailhead spar... ...and lots of other interesting cave formations.

Inspired by our tour of Jewel Cave, today we visited another national park cave, Wind Cave.  Dave got a half price discount because he's the America the Beautiful Senior Pass holder, and I had to pay the adult rate, for a total of $10.50 for both of us to tour Wind Cave.

Now that we were cave veterans, we signed up for the Garden of Eden cave tour.  This was the easiest tour Wind Cave offered and it was a 1-hour guided tour which included 150 steps.  Again we took an elevator down to the cave entrance.

This time we saw boxwork, popcorn, and frostwork formations. 

Due to the low pressure inside the cave, and also due to the fact that Dave is missing one of the lobes of his lungs, he had a problem catching his breath as the tour went on.  As soon as we came back up in the elevator, he started feeling better.  It turned out that the stairs were not a problem for either of us, but the low-hanging parts of the cave caused tall people, like Dave, to have to be careful not to bump their heads.

After touring Wind Cave, we drove about eleven miles south to the town of Hot Springs.  We thought the town seemed a bit economically depressed, but we enjoyed seeing all the old buildings and Victorian-style homes.  One of the highlights was the Veteran's Hospital complex.  The buildings were built in old-Spanish mission style.  Due to the other buildings we saw on the VA property, we wondered if maybe the site previously was built as an army base.

This blog is getting long, so tomorrow I'll post about our very interesting visit to the wooly mammoth excavation site near Hot Springs, South Dakota.