Black Hills Caves
I long busy day today. As usual, zero real planning went into the day’s activities until the night before. And even then it was at the last minute. Fortunately some did go into it however as I had originally planned on running out to the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site but discovered the visitor center wasn’t open on Sundays so I opted to try the two national cave sites in the Black Hills (Wind Cave National Park and Jewel Cave National Monument).
The caves at both sites can be visited only on guided tours and both were booked throughout the week. They do reserve a number of tickets for walk up customers however so I decided to take my chances and ran down to Wind Cave National Park first thing in the morning. At I arrived in the National Park, this handsome individual met me in the area of the park entrance. Unfortunately he finished taking his dust bath before I got the motorcycle off the road and my camera out. The second photo is about as close as I wanted to get for my selfie (there was a certain malevolence in his look).
I still got to the visitor center early but the earliest available tour of a decent length wasn’t until 3:20 PM (“Fairgrounds” tour). After grabbing my obligatory sticker for the motorcycle top case, I hopped back on the bike and shot up to Jewel Cave National Monument to see if I could get in there.
Unfortunately, the earliest available tour was at 1 PM and I likely wouldn’t be able to make it back to Wind Cave in time for my 3:20 tour. Instead I opted to do an easy 3.5 mile hike. Naturally I got caught up in birding and lost track of time so I ultimately had to rush the last mile and skip lunch just to make sure I was back to the Wind Cave NM in time for my tour. The good news is I say and heard a ton of birds including one new species for me - the Red-headed Woodpecker. I’ve heard it a couple of other times on this trip but this is the first confirmed siting. A few photos of birds, flowers, etc. from my hike.
And, woosh, back to Wind Cave NP for my 3:20 PM tour of the caves. There are a number of different tours and I opted for the most strenuous tour which was the Fairgrounds. It was still a quite easy tour (even for me). About a mile with roughly 225 steps both up and down. The tour had three different locations where the ranger discussed different features of the caves, the exploration history of the cave, and the significance in the Lakota Sioux creation story. All three aspects were pretty interesting.
The cave section we travelled through was quite wide open and rarely did I even need to duck. The main geologic features of the cave that we observed included the abundant boxwork structures (most abundant in the world?), the ‘cave popcorn’, aragonite needles, and dogtooth calcite. There is some confusion on my part regarding the needles since the ranger described them as aragonite and the NPS website calls them gypsum needles. Very different things but aragonite makes more sense to me given the environment. Photos were difficult to capture but here are some of my best.
While we were waiting to go underground, a Yellow-breasted Chat was making a ton of interesting noises above us. I was able to capture it in the process of making one of these noises.
Following the tour I spent over an hour in traffic getting up to Sturgis where I spent the evening.