Cave Management Training at Mammoth Cave, Kentucky

At the end of April I had the opportunity to travel to Mammoth Cave National Park to help teach an interagency Cave Management class. I chose to stay in one of the historic cabins in the park.

It was a nice space.

But this warning about the Kentucky Woods Mice eating anything left out gave me pause. I didn't really want to share my room.

I was one of the first presentations up, talking about cave management plans. Hopefully I managed to make the subject entertaining!

The class was held in a classroom in the morning, field trip in the afternoon, and optional activity in the evening style. Our first afternoon we went and toured the historic section of the cave.

The Mammoth Cave historic entrance is impressive. There are many more cave entrances to the longest cave in the world, at over 400 miles long.

We checked out their decon stations. Visitors cross these on the way out of the cave to help avoid spreading white-nose syndrome (WNS). WNS has been found in the park.


I was also very interested in their trail restoration, which included new hardened trails and lint curbs to keep the lint from people's clothes from spreading throughout the cave.


We saw the tuberculosis huts, which were created to help cure that disease. The experiment didn't go so well.


We also visited the bathrooms. Yep, bathrooms in a cave. It was a strange juxtoposition.


That evening we went over to nearby Diamond Caverns, a privately-owned show cave. Owner Gordon Smith gave us a warm welcome.

We split into two groups for cave tours, and I joined owner Stan Sides' trip. Diamond Caverns is really well decorated, with nice infrastructure including LED lights and lint curbs.


They just built the National Cave Museum and Library on the property. I was at the groundbreaking 2.5 years ago during the National Cave and Karst Management Symposium. It was exciting to see so much progress! The museum isn't open to the public yet, but they let us in.

Here's one of the many rooms. I started wandering around and found a couple boxes dedicated to Nevada. I asked if I could look through one and was granted permission.


Inside I found a booklet entitled "Unrivaled beauty of Lehman Caves." I was so excited, I had never seen this before! I asked for permission to look at it and take photos, and Gordon was so kind to permit that.


Here's the first page:
Dicovery
A horseman rode across the hill
And cursed his luck which was so ill
Thought he "indeed I seem to be
The larget of adversity."
Just then a miracle was wrought
As though in answer to his thought
His horses hoof had broken through
The hillside's shallow crest.
The loyal broken-legged steed
Fell helpless on his breast.
The man knelt by his horses side
The rock and turf away he pried
And through the opening in the ground
Here's what our gllant hero found.
Of volume great, a spacious room
Enveloped in a twilight gloom.
As on and on he winds his way,
For naught his footsteps hold can stay
Our hero stands in black amaze
At what now meets his anxious gaze
Let's follow him, our trusty guide
And see what Nature doth confide.

The booklet goes on in verse for a tour of the cave.

There were other pamphlets about Lehman Caves that I had never seen before. This museum and library is certainly a treasure trove!

One day we focused on cave inventory and mapping. After the classroom sessions, we went over to Dixon Cave, a gated cave near the historic entrance, and practiced inventory. It was nice to go down near the gate and feel the cool air. This was once part of Mammoth Cave, but the collapse at the historic entrance cut it off. Now it's home to many bats.

There were so many flowers blooming. This dwarf iris was near Dixon Cave.

Then we went into a section of Mammoth Cave and practiced using a compass, clinometer, tape, and later a DistoX to do cave survey. In the evening, several cave mapping gurus showed off cave maps and explained the process and software they used to make them. Two of the presenters had drafted over 500 caves each!

One day we talked about cave restoration and then took a field trip to Crystal Cave, once a tourist cave and now part of Mammoth Cave. The parking area is near an old cabin and the ticket window.


We descended a long staircase that went past a rock engraved with Floyd Collins' name. Crystal Cave is a bit off the main track, so he was trying to find a cave closer that he could develop and get rich with. While he was in Sand Cave, a rock shifted and trapped his foot. The ensuing media circus lasted for weeks, but unfortunately he didn't survive. The book Trapped by Roger Brucker covers this memorable occasion.


We were greeted inside Crystal Cave by a lot of cave crickets.

I wasn't kidding about a lot!

We saw lots of broken formations and gypsum crust along the way. The cave had been vandalized by a local rock shop to sell speleothems. Rangers discovered the speleothems and shut down the operation. The speleothems have been brought back into the cave, some still with prices on them. Lots of great restoration has occurred, but there's still lots more to do.

That night we went to a different entrance of Mammoth Cave and learned how to do cricket inventories. It was quite interesting, plus we saw Frozen Niagara, a very beautiful part of the cave.

Their pillar of moral support (Lehman Caves also has one).

Our last class day included cave safety and practicing vertical caving skills.

We finished with a round of cave management Jeopardy, which was quite entertaining.

After a fun Mexican dinner, we went to Hidden Canyon Cave in Horse Cave, Kentucky. The cave goes right under downtown, and it was incredible thinking about how polluted the cave had gotten and then how much it had been cleaned up. These caves are so connected with the surface.

A few other sights from the trip:

I loved this shower timer.

The old railroad that went to Mammoth Cave.

I went on morning runs and saw the Echo River resurgence.


And the River Styx.

And the Green River, which I canoed with my family a few years ago.

It was a beautiful trip. Watch out for ticks, though, they are thick and carry so many diseases. And the class was just really great to attend.

Yellow-bellied Marmots Are Out

 The kids and I went up Baker Creek Road in Great Basin National Park one day after school to see if the yellow-bellied marmots (Marmota flaviventris) were out. And lucky for us, they were easy to spot.

We traded in the van for an SUV that has a moonroof, and the kids had fun checking the marmots out through it.

Oh my, these are cute animals! Marmots are burrowing rodents. They also spend a lot of time out sunning themselves.

They weigh between 3.5 and 11 pounds, generally the lightest in early spring and the heaviest in late summer or early fall. Males weigh more than females.

Is this one doing yoga?

The marmots will live in colonies of up to 20 animals, with a dominant male. They eat a variety of plants, and occasionally insects and bird eggs. Coyotes are their major predator. Marmots seem to really like to dig into the road base, so they are frequently found on the Baker Creek road. They don't like to move, which makes it easier to take photos of them.

But that also means they get run over. So the park installed these Marmot Crossing signs. Can you find the marmot in the photo?

Marmots can live up to 15 years. They are one of the longest hibernating animals around. At this location, they typically come out of hibernation in March and go back in July, although the young will reawaken in September to eat more.

You can learn more about marmots here. Although they're supposed to whistle in alarm, I've never heard the ones along Baker Creek road do that.

Ice Skating above 10,000 Feet

 My friend Jenny told me that Stella Lake was frozen and that they had gone ice skating on it. What!? Stella Lake is above 10,000 feet in Great Basin National Park. Usually the Wheeler Peak Scenic Drive is closed in mid-October, but because of the lack of precipitation, it was still open in mid-November.

So Desert Girl and I headed up there Sunday morning, leaving at 7 a.m. to try to get there when it was coldest. When we arrived, we found that there was open water on part of Stella Lake. Uh, oh.

Fortunately the little cove on the east side was frozen over with about two-inch thick ice. So we put on our skates and gingerly stepped out on the ice.

Desert Girl was absolutely delighted. She fell in love ice skating last winter, and we even bought some skates for her (fortunately they adjust to four different sizes, so they'll last more than one season). She hadn't quite found her rhythm at Fire and Ice last January, but she sure wanted to try again!

She had such a good attitude and was so fun to be with!

The bubbles in the ice were fascinating.

Desert Girl did not want to stop. I had to take a break, but she kept going.

The ice was so beautiful, nice and smooth.

I climbed up the bank to get more of an overview of the lake. You can see the cove where we were. It was at most one foot deep under the ice.

We then went to Teresa Lake and had a great time skating there, but my phone battery crashed in the cold and I couldn't take any photos. Maybe that was a good thing, because it made me want to go back! The weather cooperated, so after school on Wednesday, Desert Girl and I headed back up the mountain.

We hiked to Teresa Lake, arriving about four p.m. Desert Girl chatted on the hike there, she was so thrilled to be skating again, and the hike went very fast.

I was excited when we got to the lake, because the clouds were turning colors and the ice still seemed thick enough. (I was a little worried because it was late in the day and temps had been above freezing.)

Desert Girl kept calling it Teresa Pond because it was so small. A lot of the water evaporates, and the lake shrinks during the summer. This summer it stayed big longer than usual, but it still got small in the fall.

Desert Girl called me over to look at a peanut in the ice. This is what she pointed out.

The ice was mostly smooth, although there were a couple interesting depressions in it. People had thrown rocks on the ice, and they had frozen in just enough that we couldn't move them. So we had some obstacles to avoid.

The clouds kept moving fast, the light kept changing, and I felt like I was in a magical world. Desert Girl improved her skating quite a bit.

 We found some evidence of higher lake levels on the south shore.

More fun patterns.

 Finally we were at the last light. We skated over to the edge, thanking God for such a marvelous place and experience. We had a pleasant twenty-minute dark hike back to the vehicle. The memories will last much, much longer!

I don't know if we'll ever have the opportunity to skate on these lakes again, as usually we have snow. But if the weather works out, we will surely be back, because this is an amazing place to go ice skating.