Rainy Caving Day

We found that our camping spot inside Custer State Park was central to many easy day trips. We were right down the road from the wildlife loop in one direction, a few miles from some great hiking, and just 18 miles from Mt. Rushmore. But we had a day with forecasted rain, so we went underground. It's 27 miles south to Wind Cave National Park, and 20 miles west to Jewel Cave National Monument, so we went on a caving road trip. 

The film at Wind Cave National Park describes this park's wonders above and below the ground. Because the rain hadn't started yet, we started above-ground, with a loop drive on some of the gravel national park roads. Good enough for any passenger car, we just pulled off onto NPS Road 5, and we noticed a large herd of bison running towards us. The whole herd ran in the grass right beside our pickup! We took some video of the thundering bison stampede that we suddenly found ourselves in. But video doesn't work well in the blog, so we also took a few still shots. It looks like they are just walking, but we can verify they were running.

Wow! That was a nice way to start a drive around the national prairie lands that surround Wind Cave. We found other smaller groups of bison as we continued to drive through the beautiful green hills.

If you look carefully, you can see prairie dogs popping up around that majestic bison.

As you know now, we lost our good camera. So we brought our old camera out of storage and recharged its batteries. It's just a 10x zoom (instead of 30x) so the pictures won't be as crisp. But we tried to take a few this morning. A prairie dog close to the road turned out all right.

But that blue bird sitting on a wire will be fuzzy now.

We found a coyote hunting in the meadow, and were surprised at how long he circled with his head down in the grass. He finally raised his head and we snapped a picture.

We found pronghorns far away in the hills, so it was hard to get a clear picture this morning.

But we couldn't help but stop and take several pictures of the mother pronghorn with her new twins.

As we finished the twenty-mile loop, we found more bison. We had to take a bison profile against the cloudy sky. From the looks of those clouds, it was good that we did this above-ground drive first thing. It looked like it could rain any minute.

As we drove into the Wind Cave National Park visitor center parking lot, we were amazed to see how many cars were already there. We have experienced the huge crowds in the big national parks in the summer, but even lesser-known small national parks are crowded. We had a hard time finding a parking spot. We had read that reservations were recommended for a cave tour, and we had decided to tour just one cave today. Everything we read said that Jewel Cave was the prettiest, so we had a reservation there for the afternoon. But we were surprised to see that they still had a few tour openings for two people at Wind Cave today. The only problem was that they were postponing all cave tours because of the lightning and heavy rain that just started. So we watched the national park film and toured the museum during the storm. We found that this is a less showy cave, but it is significant for its unusual "boxwork." We had never heard this term, but they had an example of the box-like structure that grows on the cave walls inside Wind Cave.

The rain continued, and the crowds of people inside the little visitor center was swelling to capacity. So we made a run through the rain back to our pickup, glad that we got to see the above-ground portion of the park before the rain. We had planned to hike the one-mile Rankin Ridge Loop, but that wasn't happening in the rain and lightning today. We counted recently, and this was our 50th national park (out of 63) to visit. As we left the park, we saw that it had also hailed. We found a few drifts of hail stones as we left Wind Cave National Park.

We drove back through the town of Custer for a quick lunch, then on to Jewel Cave. Instead of being a national park, this is a national monument. That means a difference in funding, but we would say that the facilities at these two caves seem similar. We drove to the Jewel Cave visitor center to watch the film, and checked out the museum displays. Then we hiked the half-mile Roof Loop Trail because it wasn't raining here.

Denisa likes to take pictures of wildflowers, and she couldn't decide which white flower she liked best. So she just took pictures of both.

Jewel Cave is known for its calcium carbonate structures that look like shiny jewels. Best seen on the Scenic Tour, we found that tour was all booked up when we tried for reservations two days ago. So we decided to try something unique--the historical lantern tour. One of the displays inside the visitor center showed the miles of mapped caverns underground at Jewel Cave. Even though this looks like some modern art, it's actually the map of Jewel Cave, in different colors to represent the different depths below the earth. The scenic tour will start in the center of the map, with an elevator ride down to some lower walkways to get to the good shiny stuff. But our historic tour will start a few miles away where Mark is pointing.

We drove to the cabin where the first park manager lived. This was where cave guests were greeted for their tours before the fancy brick visitor center down the road was built. 

We were greeted by a volunteer ranger wearing the same style uniform that the manager wore in the 1940s. He explained that we would walk to the historical cave entrance, where a couple brothers noticed wind coming out of a small opening in the side of a rock.

The brothers used a couple sticks of dynamite to make that small opening into the one that we walked through after our guide unlocked the gate.

Unlike the scenic tour with elevators and lighted passageways, the historical tour has old wooden steps and ladders and no lights. We were given one lantern for each two people as our only source of light. Mark used a flash to take this picture in the cave before the tour started. Denisa has on a jacket and gloves because it was a cool 49 degrees inside Jewel Cave.

After that we didn't use any more flashes, because we wanted our eyes to get adjusted to the darkness in the cave. This was the real historical deal, with no fancy runway lights or spot lights on the best cave formations. When we all turned off our lanterns, it was the kind of dark where you can't see your hand right in front of your face.

While lighter (and less dangerous) than the kerosene oil lamps that were historically used, we found these new LED lanterns were also less durable. Our lantern quit working about a quarter of the way into our tour. We were glad that Mark had packed his head light. We held it down at lantern height and used its red light option to avoid ruining the night vision that we were all adjusting to inside the very dark cave. It gave off a menacing red glow.

We took few pictures inside the cave for two reasons: 1) it was too dark, and 2) we really didn't see much. Our guide pointed out only one seam of unimpressive jewels that were high on the wall. This tour is more about the experience of being in a cave and exploring it like it was when first discovered. The tour is rated as strenuous, because we went up and down steep uneven steps and ladders in the dark, and crouched through long low tunnels. We had twenty people in our tour, so it took a while to get everyone through some of the passages. Young children and old people aren't allowed, but they let us participate anyway.

The other unique thing about this tour is that we were told to use the cave walls to support ourselves, and the guide pointed out things to touch. On the scenic tour, no touching is allowed. It was a unique experience, but we will have to go back to Jewel Cave another time to see the jewels.

It continued to rain for most of the day. As we drove back to the motor home, we were sad that this is our fifth and final night to camp inside Custer State Park. Even though it was a rainy day, it was a great excuse to go underground for a caving day.