Lint Camp 2015

 Lehman Cave at Great Basin National Park was the place to be for a lint and restoration camp in February and March.

What is lint?

Lint includes the tiny pieces of clothing (think dryer lint) that come off as we walk around. In a cave, air currents help them float around until they settle on cave formations, where they may change the way the speleothems form or provide an unnatural food source. Because caves are such sensitive environments, often with few changes such as sunlight and darkness, temperature swings, or flooding (at least in many caves in the arid Great Basin), they need a little help. They may need a lot of help if almost 30,000 people a year go through them, like Lehman Cave. If 30,000 people went through your house, it might need a little cleaning, too. (Mine needs a lot of cleaning with a lot fewer people than that!)

I took the kids to participate for a day. Desert Girl helped pick up pieces of litter with some tweezers. The tweezers made it a fun task.

A lot of people came for the February lint camp. We quickly became friends.

My friend Deanna came from Ely with her daughter, which made Desert Girl very happy.

But even with friends, the kids eventually tired of cleaning. They took a movie break. The cave proved to be an excellent theater.

Meanwhile, the volunteers were busy dusting stalactites and stalagmites, picking hairballs out of popcorn, and removing old trail debris to uncover natural cave floors. The back of the pickup truck started filling up.

So why would people volunteer their time to clean the cave? One reason is they get to visit parts of the cave that are usually off-limits, like the Talus Room. Here the special tour traverses the Sunken Garden, bypassing the pools of water.

We even found a pseudoscorpion, which is rare in this part of the cave.

Before long we were in the immense Talus Room. It is so different from the rest of Lehman Cave, cavernous and almost barren, with very few formations. Huge boulders litter the floor, giving testimony that this isn't one of the most stable parts of the cave.

Some beautiful formations do decorate the ends of the room and also this huge wall, called the Rainbow Wall.

On another slab, the cave has been turned into a bulletin board with signatures from 1885.

 Everyone enjoyed seeing the Talus Room.

Then it was back to work. Here are some rimstone dams that I was cleaning. Dirt had obscured many of the crenulations.

Another part of lint camp involved checking all the lights for algae growth, and upon finding some, spraying it with a bleach solution. The algae is not natural to the cave environment and also provides an unnatural food source.

 Lint camp has an interesting effect on people. Many come and are surprised by how much they like it. They find a zen in concentrating on just one area and making it look better. They start feeling like that little part of the cave is theirs. They can't wait to come back and make it look even better. They even say that they don't want anyone else to touch their spot--it's theirs and they have dreams about it.

So who knew? Lint camp is so much more than cleaning. It's about finding peace, making new friends, discovering parts of the cave that haven't seen the light for decades, and feeling that you're making a difference.

Thanks to everyone who participated in lint camp!

If you'd like to read a couple other perspectives, check out these articles and photos in the Los Angeles Times and National Parks Magazine.

Antelope Springs Cave and More

 It's been a number of years since I've been to Antelope Springs Cave, and I hadn't seen the whole cave the first time. The circumstances turned out right to go again, largely to a caver friend coming for a visit. We gathered three adults and two kids and got the permit and key to the gated cave and headed out on a sunny day (back in October--I'm a little behind on posting!).

 There's a small shelter cave just below the real cave entrance that provides very nice views.

Then we reached the main entrance, with a bat-friendly gate. The entrance drop is about twenty feet. The boys decided they wanted to be lowered into the cave rather than rappelling in.

The adults all rappelled into the chamber, which opened up.

We soon faced choices. Down a little hole in the floor, or down a slope that turned into a climb? We had a map from the BLM, but it was at a small scale so hard to decipher. I knew one passage I particularly wanted to visit, so we headed that way. A lot of Antelope Springs Cave consists of a tube with domes and floors that suddenly drop off.

We found some wonderful colors in the rock and formation.

We also found a lot of tight spots. We had to try some. Here's Desert Boy going through one. A couple adults went through this little hole too. The cave is warm, but when you're belly crawling, it feels even warmer.

There's not a lot of graffiti in the cave, but some. We explained cave conservation to the boys and how it is really bad form (not to mention illegal) to spray paint or write on the walls. We also explained how the arrows usually show the way out of the cave. However, sometimes the people don't know the way out, like shown below.

We spent a fun few hours looking around. This is a challenging cave, with lots of climbing, steep dropp offs, and slippery slopes. At one point I even made a webbing harness and we belayed the boys with another piece of webbing. Eventually we decided it was time to go, particularly when we got to a very slippery spot with a long, steep slope. I wanted to have the boys tied in for that, but we didn't have enough extra webbing or rope with us. So we played it safe and headed back. There are a lot of potentially dangerous places in this cave where it would be easy to break a leg, so we went slow. And as you can see from the photos, we all had helmets, multiple lights, gloves, knee pads, and some even had elbow pads.

To get the boys out we used a traveling haul system. This is a haul system that moves with the patient, and although it's not as quick as a haul from the top, it could be useful in some situations. Plus it's good to practice those rescue skills regularly! For the first boy, we had the boy push up the upper ascender (a Pantin). He could only move it up about a foot at a time, so we had a lot of resets. For Desert Boy, we put a webbing leash on the Pantin that could be pulled from the top, and that worked really well. The only extra gear used besides the regular Frog system were two pulleys and a piece of webbing.

Although Desert Boy enjoyed his free ride up, we'll be doing some vertical training soon to get him ready for the climbing contests at the 2016 NSS Convention in Ely, Nevada.

The light of day is always a welcome sight after a satisfying cave trip.

After we refueled, we went to the public land near U-Dig Fossils and spent some time looking for trilobites. We didn't find many, but we did see a few, including very small ones.

Breaking rocks was a lot of fun.

Another stop on the way back was Hermit's Cave in Marjum Canyon.

We found some supplies there for the Apocalypse. The mice had found them too, unfortunately.

We also noticed some climbing bolts in the area--something we may have to return and try out.

One of our group got a flat tire, so we had to go slow. That let us get some spectacular views of Notch Peak, the highest limestone cliff in North America.

During the whole day I think we saw only one or two other vehicles. These are remote places!