The Karst Topography...of California? A Look at California Caverns

We took a field studies trip a few weeks ago, and it turned into a mini-series on the karst terrain of California, a landscape that forms over limestone and marble. The development of caverns leads to distinctive features on the surface above, including sinkholes and disappearing streams. I've covered the sights we saw on that trip, but there are plenty of other caverns across the state, more than a thousand of them. I've only explored a relative handful, but the ones I've seen are spectacular. I'm going to explore a few more of them in coming posts.

Today's post is about some caverns in the Mother Lode of the Sierra Nevada named after the state. California Caverns have been known since the Gold Rush days, and etchings in the cave dating to the 1800s attest to the long history of human exploration. To no one's surprise, the well-traveled parts of the cave have been used and abused. It was standard practice in the old days to break off stalactites as souvenirs, and to use a cavern wall as a register.

This fact is what makes California Caverns a special treat. In the Gold Rush days, only about 300 feet of passageways were known, and the worst damage occurred in those passages. They are rather barren and unremarkable.

The deeper passageways are somewhat less damaged, and the cave becomes more interesting. Some of the higher ceilings escaped vandalism and retain some marvelous examples of cave bacon.

Our guide takes us into the deeper passages to the Bridal Chamber. There is an immense mountain of flowstone in the back that is just stunning. It is noticeably cleaner and white than speleothems in the previous passageways. In older days, this was the end of the cave. A debris-filled passageway behind the Bridal Chamber went unnoticed for many years. Several decades ago, spelunkers started moving the debris, and squeezed through an extremely narrow hole (which would have caused me to become unhinged, given my tendency towards claustrophobia in certain situations).

The explorers emerged into a stunning chamber, now called the Jungle Room. No human had ever set foot here before. I can barely imagine what that was like. Luckily, they kept the room a secret for years, safe from vandalism, before preparing the cave for public tours. Now, anyone can see what a pristine cave looks like. It's true that pristine caves don't have carefully placed lighting, but one can think of the situation as being like a museum exhibit: the art is carefully managed, and lighting is used for highlighting the best perspective.

The room is filled with incredibly delicate stalactites and soda straws, the kinds of speleothems that are the first to be broken off by vandals and souvenir hunters. There are thousands of them, each one a treasure. They are pearly white, having never been grimed up by torches and sooty lanterns.

Dark corners hint at additional passageways, and indeed California Caverns are now known to be one of the longest caves in California, at 1.4 miles (the longest in the state is Lilburn Cave in Kings Canyon National Park at 21 miles, 28th longest in the United States).

Every corner of the Jungle Room is a revelation...I could almost feel the joy that John Muir felt when he visited the caves before they had been so badly defaced:

Here we lingered and reveled, rejoicing to find so much music in stony silence, so much splendor in darkness, so many mansions in the depths of the mountains, buildings ever in process of construction, yet never finished, developing from perfection to perfection, profusion without overabundance; every particle visible or invisible in glorious motion, marching to the music of the spheres in a region regarded as the abode of eternal stillness and death.

The caven is still active. In wet years the lower passageways are filled with water and must be pumped to provide access. Seeing the water flowing across the surfaces of the cave decorations provides greater depth to their appearance.

California Caverns were in the center of the area that burned during the Butte Fire in September, and they lost power and water. Amazingly, the visitor center survived, but vegetation in the area was severely affected. The caves are open for visitation, however, and are being done temporarily as lantern tours. You can get updates concerning the caves by clicking here. 

California Caverns are another treasure of the state's karst topography. They are worth a visit if you are ever in the vicinity of San Andreas in the Mother Lode.

It's Just a Damned Rock...or Stalactite...or Wolf...or National Park. Where does it stop?

The subject of today's post grew out of several news items from the past few weeks, and a walk underground that I took yesterday.

I'm going to start with a bit of a mental exercise. Imagine a cavern in a place like the Sierra Nevada foothills, a cave that was discovered by miners in the 1850s, and offered up as tourist stop for the next 30 years or so. Think how attitudes about caves differed in those days. Visitors regularly broke off stalactites as souvenirs, and many carved or wrote their names on the walls. Imagine a cave where such activities continued until few speleothems (cave decorations like stalactites and stalagmites) were left, and people lost interest in visiting the site. It fell into disuse and was abandoned, forgotten by all but a few spelunkers, and even they rarely visited.

Skip forward a century or so. Spelunkers explore the cave, and find some indications of deeper passageways, maybe a pile of rubble, or perhaps a cool breeze coming from a small crack in the wall. They start removing the rubble, and realize that a narrow passage may reach into deeper recesses never discovered by the miners and early tourists. Weeks of work and they break through into a new room, a room never before seen by human eyes. A room full of stalactites and other features never broken off or smudged by soot. As a geologist and explorer of the Earth, I've dreamed of doing something like this, but I can't quite fit in the tight passages the way I used to in my youth (not to mention a sense of claustrophobia!). Luckily we can experience something like this discovery in several of California's beautiful caverns, especially Black Chasm, and the subject of today's photography, California Cavern. We visited yesterday as part of a field studies class in the Sierra Nevada foothills.

California Cavern is owned and operated privately, and some parts of the cavern system are utilized extensively for recreation, but they've done a good job of protecting the gem of a room that was discovered in the late 1980's. It's called the Jungle Room and it is full of some of the most delicate speleothems I've ever seen. The most extraordinary are the soda straws, thin long stalactites that look so delicate that a single touch could break them off. And they haven't been broken.

The tour guides spend their time in the first barren looking rooms talking about how the miners and early tourists used to use this room for court, that room for meetings and this other room for preaching or marriage ceremonies. They point out the carvings and other graffiti on the walls, but mostly what I see is destruction of anything within the reach of hands or long sticks. It is sad to think of what was lost in the inkling of time, those few years out of hundreds of thousands that humans entered into these underground openings.

I don't think that the early visitors acted out of maliciousness, just ignorance, but I am seeing a new class of people these days, destructive people who wish only to destroy, for reasons I cannot begin to fathom. I think of the arsonists who would destroy ancient forests, and people who would take advantage of a government shutdown to invade and destroy the beautiful parts of our national parks and monuments.

I wonder if that idiot Representative Randy Neugebauer, who berated a park ranger who was (unhappily) erecting barriers at one of our war memorials, gave even a moment's thought to what could have happened if the park service left the memorials unprotected and unpatrolled. All over the country, terrible people wandered into parks, leaving behind vandalized facilities and obscene messages.

Caves can sometimes be protected behind locked doors, but other caves are unprotected. Every year more damage is done. And sometimes those responsible will say things like "it's just a single damned stalactite, it's just a single rock, it's just a single wolf I shot", it's whatever someone felt justified in destroying. And since we find that corporations are "people too", we have corporations who say "it's just another damn forest, or river, or meadow" that we want to develop, or log, or mine. What will it hurt to destroy just one more?

I love seeing perfection. It happens so rarely, and it is always so fragile. That's what I was able to observe yesterday, deep inside the mountainside. Our Earth is fragile too, and we've already done so much damage.

On the way out of the cave after our tour I noticed something that I hadn't seen before. Some of the stalactites were repairing themselves! It was only the littlest change, but some of the soda straws and stalactites were growing again, and I realized that in at least some caves, the features may return, probably long after we humans have become extinct and perhaps replaced by beings with a better sense of beauty. It left me with a little bit of hope.

So I end with the morons in Utah's beautiful Goblin Valley, one of my favorite places to visit. Yeah, it's just another damned rock. Who really cares if we push it over? There are hundreds of others. What will it hurt? And besides, they were "saving lives". They are morons, maybe, and deserving of punishment. Because I love places like Goblin Valley, my first impulse is that they ought to go to prison, but on second thought, it might be better if they get a sentence of community service, hopefully teaching others the importance of protecting the wild places instead of destroying them. It's not likely that the message will sink in, but one can hope.
 

What is it like to be the first person to step into a newly discovered cavern?

Actually, I don't know. I am not a hardcore caver who spends weekends crawling through poison oak and snake-infested outcrops looking for fist-sized openings in the limestone that might lead to undiscovered treasures beneath the surface of the earth (although I would love doing such a thing!).

But I do know that I am continually frustrated to wander through a cavern that has been overused and abused, frustrated that I can never see the various rooms in their pristine state, as they existed before human discovery. Tourist caves in the Sierra Nevada Mother Lode were mostly discovered in the middle and late 1800s. The early explorers carried smoking torches, and thought nothing of destroying delicate speleothems if it served their purposes (liking making underground dance halls and the like). Visitors regularly broke off stalactites to take home as souvenirs.

The outer reaches of California Caverns suffered this fate, as I described in my previous post.

It turns out that the miners and early visitors never noticed the debris blocking an extremely narrow passageway in the rear wall of the Bridal Chamber in the most remote section of California Cavern. A few decades ago, explorers worked their way through the claustrophobic tunnel and emerged in a large space that came to be called the Jungle Room. It was full of the most delicate cave decorations imaginable.

In the ensuing years, the passage was widened, and a trail constructed so the Jungle Room could be added to the public tour. Entering the Jungle Room is to see a pristine cave, one that is mostly untouched by the abuses that have marred many other caverns. Soda straws and helictites are two extremely delicate features that are invariably broken off by cave vandals. They are here in profusion.

Soda straws are pretty much like their namesakes, thin stalactites with hollow interiors. Some that I could see were feet, rather than inches long. Helictites are essentially soda straws or stalactites on drugs; they have forgotten that they are supposed to be influenced by gravity. They develop in random directions, probably due to water seeping out under pressure through different openings, causing precipitation of calcite in odd directions. An example can be seen coming off the stalactite in the center of the picture below.

Every corner of the Jungle Room is a revelation...I could almost feel the joy that John Muir felt when he visited the caves before they had been so badly defaced:

Here we lingered and reveled, rejoicing to find so much music in stony silence, so much splendor in darkness, so many mansions in the depths of the mountains, buildings ever in process of construction, yet never finished, developing from perfection to perfection, profusion without overabundance; every particle visible or invisible in glorious motion, marching to the music of the spheres in a region regarded as the abode of eternal stillness and death.

The cave is still active and many of the formations are dripping and streaming with water.

One of the stalagmites particularly stood out (below). Without the dirt of a century of misuse, the formations are pearly white in texture and appearance, and are simply stunning. The Jungle Room is a wonderful chance to feel, for a few moments, like you are the first person who has ever laid eyes on these treasures. It is well worth a visit.

The discovery of the Jungle Room was just the beginning. More passageways led off from the depths of the new section of cave, and the total measured length of the cavern system now exceeds a mile. The company offers extended tours of the newer passageways, but I haven't yet had the privilege (it's a bit more expensive...).

California has Caverns? Really? Exploring the California Underground

They are not as well-known as some other tourist attractions in the state, but California has a marvelous selection of limestone and marble caverns that are open for tours. Most of the tourist caves are privately owned, but one is in a national park (Crystal Cave in Sequoia), and another is in a state park (Mitchell Caverns in the Providence Mountains; soon to be closed due to budget cuts). There are wild caves in the Klamath Mountains, the Mojave Desert, and even a few in the Coast Ranges, but most of California's caves are found in the Mother Lode of the western Sierra Nevada and in Sequoia and Kings Canyon. There are around 1,000 known caverns, and some are world class in their features: one has more than 17 miles of passageways (Lilburn Cave in Kings Canyon).

Last weekend I returned to a cave that I haven't visited in a decade, California Caverns near the town of San Andreas in the Mother Lode. We were on geology field studies trip, and 26 students were along for the ride. I've always liked California Caverns, but scheduling considerations have usually made Black Chasm Cave our preferred choice. I looked forward to returning after a long absence. There are certain things about California Caverns that make them pretty special.

The caves were among the earliest to be discovered, in 1849 or 1850, and under the name Mammoth Cave became the first commercial cave in the state. John Muir visited in the 1890s, and found the experience inspiring:

"It was delightful to witness here the infinite deliberation of Nature, and the simplicity of her methods in the production of such mighty results, such perfect repose combined with restless enthusiastic energy. Though cold and bloodless as a landscape of polar ice, building was going on in the dark with incessant activity. The archways and ceilings were everywhere hung with down-growing crystals, like inverted groves of leafless saplings, some of them large, others delicately attenuated, each tipped with a single drop of water, like the terminal bud of a pine-tree. The only appreciable sounds were the dripping and tinkling of water falling into pools or faintly plashing on the crystal floors."

We hiked to the shed at the cave exit where we donned hardhats (for good reason it turned out), and turning around I saw a number of turkeys wandering by. I snapped a quick shot, and later on found what camouflage is. How many turkeys can you see in the picture? I count two...

After a few comments by our guide outside the cave, we entered the historic entrance, used since the original discovery of the cave by miners. No matter how many times I walk into a cave, I get a sense of anticipation, the knowledge that I about to see something new and different. And I always seem to.

With a history of 150 years of visitors, more than a few left behind evidence of their passing; one of the outer rooms has lots of historical inscriptions, otherwise known as old graffiti. I think that this is the first time I have ever seen a chandelier in a cave...

I was beginning to be disturbed by something. The cave seemed to be lacking decorations, the stalactites, stalagmites and flowstone features that one expects to be lining the walls and ceilings of the cave.

There were certainly a number of speleothems (cave decorations) in several spots; there was an ornate cave popcorn feature in one passageway. The origin of popcorn is not completely understood; it may form when the cave is still immersed in water.

A particularly beautiful cave decoration is a drapery. These form as water flows along the edge of a fin of rock. The thin formations are often translucent, and are sometimes referred to as "cave bacon".

Overall, though, the passageways seemed bereft of the stalactites and soda straws one would expect to see. In the Bishop's Palace (below), one can see a few large stalactites hanging down, but few delicate ones. It's not too hard to understand why...a century ago, it was considered OK to break off a stalactite to take home as a souvenir. I wonder how long it took before cave operators realized their visitors were destroying the very thing that made caves an interesting place to explore?

As we went deeper into the cave, I could see some delicate soda straws on the ceiling. This may have been in the Bed of Nails Room (corrections welcome if I am wrong in my cave geography). I was pleased to see these fragile features remaining from the depredations of the early cave explorers. A closer look told a different story...

Many of these inch-long soda straws were the growths of new material starting to replace those that were broken off a century ago. These small speleothems show the infinite slowness with which these features develop. Once a stalactite has been broken off, it will never be replaced in our lifetimes.

Still, a fascinating sight, and a challenge to photograph without a tripod! One thing I have learned is to take the shots on a two-second delay, so my finger doesn't shake the camera in the dim light. I try to avoid using the flash, as it washes out colors and shadows.

In the back of the historical reaches of the cave, we found the Bridal Chamber, where a massive stalagmite-slash-flowstone monument dominates the room. It is one of the cleaner, more interesting speleothems that we had yet seen, but there was still a certain sadness in my mind. The unfortunate cave has suffered a lot of abuse over the years. It certainly is not the fault of the present operators; they have worked hard to protect what is left, and have allowed many of the damaged features to start recovering (note how clean the flowstone is in the picture below). But the damage is still there, from decades of ignorance and even vandalism.

We had reached the back of the cave, at least as far into the cave as the miners and early tourists ever explored. Something special that was about to happen...which we will talk about in the next post!

California Cavern is operated by the Sierra Nevada Recreation Corporation. Information about tours can be found here.