Wind Cave

I had done some research that indicated that the busiest days at Wind Cave National Park were Tuesday and Wednesday (huh?) and that you should arrive early in order to get a ticket for the ranger guided tours (entrance to this cave is only via a tour). So, we planned to leave early on Monday morning to drive down to Wind Cave (the furthest away place we wanted to visit while here in the Black Hills). We had thought that we would try to drive the Custer State Park Wildlife Loop on the way in order to visit it early in the day when we might have more wildlife sightings, but we didn't get away until a little after 7am, so we delayed that until later in the day.

Regardless, we took a scenic drive down...

... as most of the roads in this area are scenic! A tunnel through which Miss Doozie would NOT fit!

Curvy roads...

Places where the road split into two separate lanes.

We eventually arrived at Wind Cave National Park and easily got tickets for the 9am Natural Entrance tour.

Ranger Kendra started us outside the cave, at the entrance that was first discovered by white men to the cave in 1881. The story goes that two brothers, Jesse and Tom Bingham, heard whistling and when they went to investigate, Jesse's hat was blown off his head when he bent over the hole! When they returned to show others later, the atmospheric conditions had changed, and when he held his hat over the hole to demonstrate the wind blowing it up, it instead sucked his hat into the hole! The story is that he climbed in to find his hat, never found the hat, but started discovering the cave.

Ranger Kendra had brought a piece of ribbon along - she asked us to guess whether the cave was "breathing in" or "out" - then she let the end of the ribbon loose and it was blowing outward. (Kinda hard to tell in the picture...)

Information from the visitor center about the "wind" of Wind Cave

One of the features that is unique to Wind Cave is "boxwork"...

... these parts were on the ceiling of the room we were in...

In the pictures, they look more like spider webs or maybe corrugated cardboard. They were named "boxwork" because they reminded early cavers of post office boxes.

 At one point, Ranger Kendra asked us to imagine how different it would have been exploring the cave in the 1800s. We suggested that things like the concrete steps, walking path, railings, and lights would not have been there...

So... she turned out the lights so we could experience the total darkness! Dwayne took a picture! Either that, or he had the lens cap on when he took this one!

Some more boxwork - these look like bats to me!

Sometimes the walls were very close as we walked through...

Sometimes the ceiling got a little low...

Some boxwork on the side of the cave - I can see this more like post office boxes (than the examples on the ceiling).

The last chamber we were in before heading to the elevator for the surface. Yes, I have a jacket and scarf on... it was in the 50s inside the cave... and not much warmer than that outside when we went in, though it warmed up outside as the day went on.

There was an example of boxwork in the elevator area after we had returned to ground level...

An explanation in the visitor center of how scientists think that the boxwork was formed.

There are over 140 miles of the cave currently mapped, but it is estimated only about 5% of the cave has been discovered!

Current cave mapping. The lightest color is nearest the surface, reddish is deepest, and there are a few places where underground lakes have been discovered.

This map shows where the tours go - the bluish rectangular shape is the visitor center, the natural entrance is above it to the left...

Here's a zoom in - we took the Natural Entrance tour, which doesn't actually go into the Natural Entrance (that was the small hole where Ranger Kendra showed us which way the wind was blowing at the time of our tour) - but there is a walk in entrance that has a closed-off room so we could go into that room, and have the door closed, before opening the other door and entering the cave, to try to minimize the atmospheric impact of our entry on the cave. Our tour followed the mustard colored line - so we traveled back nearly under the area where the Visitor Center is located... You can see some of the names of rooms in the cave - Chamber of Lost Souls, Fairy Palace, Post Office, Rookery, Snowdrift Avenue - Kendra said that if you discover a new room, you have the honor of naming it... but you can't name it after yourself ("Patti's Parlor" has a nice ring, doesn't it?).... so some of the rooms have "interesting" names.

Continuation of the map that shows our tour - again, the mustard colored line. It ultimately ended at the Elevator about the same distance from the Visitor Center as the Walk In entrance was the other way. You can also see that there are other tours that visit other parts of the cave. Some more names on this part - Blue Grotto, Cathedral, Model Room, Temple, 3-Way Stairs, Crossroads, Assembly Room, Garden of Eden, Rome, Spillway, Frostline.

The other tours and their colors on the map and description.

A mapping showing depth.

One of the folks who explored the cave before 1900 was just a teenager when he started exploring - Alvin McDonald. He kept a detailed diary of his explorations...

One page of his diary. Unfortunately, when he was in Chicago for an event (maybe the World's Fair?) to publicize the cave to encourage more visitors, he contracted typhoid and died in his 20s. In 1891, he wrote in his diary, "Have given up the idea of finding the end of Wind Cave."

This shows workers carrying cement into the cave for the building of the steps and walkways. They cut tires in half and put cement into the half tire and carried it in. Ranger Kendra told us that the construction of each step took at least 3 "tire loads" of cement. The cave was made a national park in 1903, and CCC workers were employed to build the steps in the 1930s. Later, National Park Service workers carried the cement used to build the walkways inside the cave.

The part of the cave where we went on the tour had lighting that allowed us to see many of the features of the cave, though it was by-no-means brightly lit. These pictures show the workers with the wire that was being run into the cave.

We had visited Wind Cave when we came to this area in 2009, and it was one of the places we definitely wanted to visit again. The pictures don't do the interior of the cave justice; if you come to this area, we recommend visiting Wind Cave!