The Sequoia Underground: An Exploration of Crystal Cave

It's true that Crystal Cave in Sequoia National Park can hardly be described as a wild cave. Since its discovery in 1918 and its development as a park attraction in 1940, the cave has been visited by more than a million people. Dynamite was used by workers to widen passageways, and besides the lighting and pathways, there was a generator, and underground bathrooms. And yet there is still something wild about the cavern. Because it was discovered by park personnel and protected from vandalism from the beginning, the cave presents some wonderful examples of speleothems (cave decorations). The cave has a total of 2.42 miles of passageways (the third largest in California), but only a fraction ever receives visitors. The rest remains an underground wilderness.

The cave is an integral part of our field studies course on the geology of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks. We paid a visit this last weekend and made the cave our first stop. Our tour began with an orientation on White-nose Syndrome (a fungus that kills bats), and sterilized our shoes. We then started down the half mile trail to the cave entrance.

The trail itself is a pleasure, and a good introduction to the local geology. The rocks are part of the Kings Terrane, a group of metamorphic rocks that formed in a shallow marine setting in Triassic and Jurassic time (around 200-150 million years ago) with some parts possibly older. The rocks formed in the Pacific Ocean and were accreted to the western edge of the North American continent as the mass of continental crust entered into the vast subduction zone that was consuming the ocean crust. The collision and subsequent invasion of the rock by molten granite caused the silt, sand and lime mud to become schist, quartzite and marble. It is in the marble that we find the caverns forming.

The trail provides a nice view of the marble cliffs. Permanent springs cause Cascade Creek to flow year round, providing a cool stretch of trail on a hot day and some beautiful small waterfalls.

Soon we reached the entrance to the cave and met our guide. The cave is administered by the Sequoia Natural History Association and is generally open for tours from the early spring to late fall.

A cool breeze was blowing out of the cave. The temperature is controlled by the average year-round climate, so the cave is relatively cooler in summer, and warmer in winter. Although the darkness of the cave provides little in the way of food, a number of animals do live in the cave, including a number of species of bat, and small arthropods like spiders, isopods and pseudoscorpions.

Entry into the cave is controlled by the famous spider-web gateway. I remember vividly seeing that gate when I visited the park for the first time as a child in the 1960s, and I remember the gate (and the underground bathrooms) the best.

Given the number of visitors, it's amazing that any cave decorations are left. It's to the credit of the park service and history association workers that so little damage has been done, although plenty of bad things have happened (the park service actually allowed self-guided tours for a brief time with disastrous results). The improvements to the pathway have actually meant that some of the stalactites and stalagmites have begun healing from previous damage, as evidenced by the pure white calcite on some surfaces. Dust from tramping feet and smoke from torches left many features a dingy yellow or brown color.

We passed some beautiful stalagmites on the floor of the cave, and then moved into the Junction Room, which was filled with the sound of babbling little brook. The cave is still very active, as it diverts a nearby creek underground. There are several levels to the cave, developed as the local canyons outside have gotten deeper, causing the rivers inside the cave to erode downward. There are numerous benches and terraces attesting to the former presence of higher level streams.

We moved through the Curtain Room, where a profusion of cave curtains and draperies hang from the walls and ceiling of the cave. They are out of reach of vandals and are thus largely unbroken.

The Dome Room contains one of the cavern's most famous features, the Fairy Pools. The rimstone pools and soda straws are actively forming (and recovering slowly from vandalism).

A zoom onto the soda straws (below) shows the water droplets on the ends. In these conditions, soda straws can grow at maybe an inch per century.

The unbroken draperies show an intricate structure.

The Marble Room is the largest in the cave, extending for more than 100 feet, with the ceiling 30 feet above. It is an amazing sight. It's also where they turn out the lights and let explorers get a feel for total darkness. Some people really don't like the sensation.

There are nearly 300 known caverns in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks (Boyden Cave, another developed cave, is just outside the park boundary). The caverns include Lilburn Cave, which at 28 miles of passageways is in the top twenty of the largest caves in the nation. Most of the wild caves are remote, and their locations are kept secret for obvious reasons. Clough Cave was known a century ago as a beautiful cave festooned with thousands of stalactites. When the cave was publicized, the speleothems started to disappear, and today Clough Cave is pretty much a featureless hole in the ground. Several vandals were caught by park rangers in 1997 stealing some of the last artifacts in the cave. What a crying shame.

In the meantime, if you ever visit Sequoia or Kings Canyon, be sure to give the cavern a look. You won't regret it!

Where are the Ten Most Incredible Places You've Ever Stood? My Number 4: What is it like to be the first person ever to see a cavern?

Can you imagine flashing a light in a dark corner of a cavern, knowing that you are the first human being ever to lay eyes on the formations? I haven't had that privilege in my life, but I have found two or three places where I can imagine what the experience was like. Most of the caverns that are accessible to amateur spelunkers like myself have been long known and rather completely explored. Unfortunately, most of them have been severely vandalized, and the early use of torches for light left soot deposits on the formations. It is a rare treasure to see a cave where damage has not yet happened. Such caves in my experience include California Caverns near San Andreas, California,  Black Chasm Cavern near Jackson, California, and the subject of today's post, Kartchner Caverns near Benson, Arizona.

Many of the speleothems are still active; there are water droplets on many of the soda straws

The "Ten Most Incredible Places I've Ever Stood" series has been a series of hard choices. This one made the list because of the shock and the awe, the way the cavern made my jaw drop as I stepped in. It is an experience unlike any other that I've had while underground. There is a difference between even a well-protected cave, and one in which whole areas have never been touched by a human being. The floor of one of the large rooms was covered with mud, and it was clear from the trackway above that only one trail through it was ever made, in order to put in a light source. The rest of the room remains as it was discovered.

How incredible is it that some of the soda straws that fell are still standing in the mud?

The discovery and visitation of any cave causes irreversible changes. Kartchner Caverns were discovered on private lands in 1974 and the people who found them were concerned about preserving the original cave environment. The cave was at nearly 100% humidity, and opening it to the desert environment would have dried it out. Such changes in humidity can adversely affect life in the cave and stunt the growth and development of speleothems (cave decorations like stalactites and stalagmites). And yet the caves were spectacular. Was there some way of preserving the caves while making them accessible to the public?

The discoverers hit on an audacious solution. Through a series of delicate and secret negotiations, the owners of the land agreed to sell the lands containing the cave to the state of Arizona to be developed as a show cave, but to be developed in such a way as to preserve both the features and the climate inside the cave (many of the legislators didn't know what or where the park was when they voted for it). They preserved the humidity of the cave using a series of unique airlocks. Pathways were constructed with a minimum of disruptions to the original configuration of the cave. It took 25 years from the time of discovery to the opening of the park to the public in 1999.

There was one catch. Nothing goes into the cave with the visitors. No food, no water, no backpacks...and no cameras. As you might expect, I live for photography and this for me was a hard restriction. In 2005, though, I got the opportunity of a lifetime: as part of a fund-raiser for the park's foundation, they had a photography day, and the National Association of Geoscience Teachers made arrangements for us to take part. I was going to be given access to the cavern to photograph to my heart's content. To be sure, I had to sign a waiver of commercial rights, and the images that you see in this post today are protected and cannot be sold or used in any way.

Perhaps the most incredible stalagmite/column I've ever seen

What a wonder it was to step into a cave that appeared the same as it was on the day of discovery! The airlock closed behind me and although the temperature was only 78 degrees, it felt much hotter because of the intense humidity. The passageways were dimly lit and it took some time to develop my night vision. But moment by moment the cavern came into focus. It was simply stunning.

I wandered from passage to passage lost in the moment. It was nice not having a guide (staff were stationed throughout the cave to answer questions and keep an eye on things), but it was also nice to be exploring a pristine cave knowing I wasn't doing major damage just by being there. Exploring a newly discovered cave means leaving muddy footprints and accidentally destroying delicate formations underfoot, or leaving trails in the mud. I remember thinking that the experience was something like being in a museum, but I thought that in a good way: the resource was being protected, and yet hundreds of thousands of people could see and enjoy it. 

Some marvelous "helictites", otherwise known as stalactites on LSD.

Although I can't be mistaken for a professional photographer, I learned long ago that photography in a cave is always tricky. There is no "natural" look to a cave except total darkness, but a camera flash steals perspective and washes out delicate differences in color and shading. I used the ambient lighting to maintain some depth to the photos. That meant standing very still for longer than usual exposure times (tripods weren't allowed at the time). 

Flowstone refers to speleothems that result from water seeping out of cracks in the walls of a cavern. Over time gigantic mounds build up that resemble ice cream sundaes. Kartchner is full of spectacular examples.

I'm not sure what to make of the features below. There are some nice soda straws, which are so delicate that they are the first to be broken off in unprotected caves. The spiky things are the beginnings of helictites, which tend to ignore gravity, growing instead under the influence of water pressure from the interior of the "confused" stalagmites.

Below, one can see a spectacular column in the foreground, and some marvelous draperies in the upper left background. None of the features were broken off, and none were vandalized. I can barely describe what it is like being in such a place. Every minute in the cave was precious. I know there is an argument about worrying over technology in situations like this, and that one needs to live in the moment, reveling in the experience of being, but I actually find caves disorienting. Despite all my orienteering skills on the Earth's surface (and people tell me they are formidable) I get lost in caves. I can't remember one room or one decoration from another. Photographs keep me centered, and keep the memories of the moment alive. And I can share them!

I passed a stunning wall of draperies. Time was beginning to run short and I would be needing to leave this fantastical world for the surface before long. I was sweating, dehydrated, hungry and tired. It wasn't difficult getting around, but the humidity gets to you eventually, draining your energy. I started to head for the exit chamber and the airlock to the outer world.

There was one last close-up of a moist, almost glowing surface of some flowstone, and then I was out the door to the world of light and fresh air. The contrast was shocking. Caverns are incredible places, but they aren't really a human environment. I can understand how the first explorations of caverns could awaken our ancestors to the ideas of shadow-worlds with their demons and nightmares. Hell was presented as an underworld of fiery pits and eternal torment. But in a different context, caverns have been a place where dreams come alive. I think of the spiritual awakening of an initiate in a deep cave thousands of years ago encountering the drawn images of animals and people on a cavern wall seeming to run and play in the flickering light of a burning torch. Wandering through a pristine cave in the present day brings us face to face with a fascinating world that is not completely apart from us. The deep hidden parts of caves may not be a human environment, but much of our early spiritual and cultural development derived from living and exploring the outer edges of the underground environment. Caves are places where magic seems possible.

Inside the Biggest Cavern Opening in California: Moaning Caverns in the Sierra Nevada Foothills

Yes, I had another field trip today! It was less academic then some, as it was a Geology Club tour, but learning was part of the experience. We headed into the Sierra Nevada foothills to check out some karst topography, visiting Moaning Caverns, and exploring Natural Bridges at New Melones Reservoir. I'll cover the Natural Bridges in a separate post later on.

Moaning Caverns has one overwhelming distinction: it has the largest underground opening in California. The 180 foot tall main room could actually fit the Statue of Liberty (but good luck getting it through the narrow cave opening)! There are other interesting features, but size is everything here. I've been to Carlsbad Cavern, and it is in a class by itself, but I've also been in many caves in California, and none has a room to match this one.

I'm proud to say that one of our geology majors served as our guide at the cave tour today. She did herself proud. The tour starts around the historical cavern entrance, and it wasn't a historically great place to discover a cave: it has a vertical drop that with a few wall collisions totals around 170 feet (the guides call it the 7-second tour). Animals and humans have stumbled into the cave many times in the past, and many bones have been discovered in the bottom, including a human skull said to be 12,000 years old (I'll have to ask some anthropologists for a judgement on that one). Some of the bones are displayed in the glass cabinet in the picture above.

The cavern has been known for a century or more, and tours have been offered since the 1920s. The difficulty of the original entry has been circumvented by blasting a narrow passageway and the installation of stairs. Lots of stairs. I've been exercising a lot in recent weeks and yet my legs were rubbery by the time I got to the top!

The base of the stairwell is a platform that allows a view down into the main room. It's hard to get a true perspective of the size, and our guide pointed out that features we thought were a few tens of feet away were actually more than a hundred.

It's kind of fun to have our guide narrate the tour while dangling from a rope a hundred feet above the base of the main room. Serena displayed a flair for the dramatic! We tourists took the alternate route, a circular stairway 100 feet high that was welded from fragments of a World War I battleship in about 1922. What's more scary, a 165 foot rappel, or trusting a ninety year old iron stairwell that has been in a humid environment the whole time?

 It's a thrill ride either way!

 From the bottom of the stair, we could look up at some of the excellent speleothems (cave decorations). There was a twenty or thirty foot high stalagmite...

And an IMMENSE flowstone feature called the Chocolate Fall. I've never seen anything like quite like it anywhere else. It seemed to extend halfway up the wall of the main room.

It is very difficult to discern the scale of the room in a photograph. Below, you can see the stalagmite and Chocolate Fall in comparison to the circular stairwell. 

And here is a shot from near the top of the circular stairwell, looking straight down. Those little dots are some of my students still exploring the bottom of the cave.

Moaning Caverns offers a standard walking tour (what we did), and a more extended adventure tour that explores additional rooms below and around the main chamber. Some lower passages haven't been explored in years. The vertical nature of the cave means that carbon dioxide can accumulate to dangerous levels in the deepest portions.

One can also rappel. Um, no thanks, I'll take a rain check.

The owners of the caves are quite decent about providing discounts for student groups. They can be contacted at http://www.caverntours.com/MoCavRt.htm.

Next, an adventure in the Natural Bridges...

PS: "Moaning"? I didn't talk about the name, did I? They say today that it is from the particular way that dripping water echoes off some of the rocks, but I remember hearing (this isn't hearsay at all!) that the pressure differences caused a very strong airflow through the original entrance that would whistle and moan like a ghost. The development of the cave nearly a century ago destroyed the effect.

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.
 

Leaving the Abandoned Lands for Greener Pastures: Wrapping up a Tour of the Colorado Plateau

We'd been on the road for a while, back in June of 2012. Our tour of the Abandoned Lands had taken us on a grand loop that included Grand Canyon, Petrified Forest, the pueblos of New Mexico, the Jemez Caldera, Chaco Canyon, Mesa Verde, Arches, Canyonlands, and Bryce Canyon National Park. 35 of us had been living as a slightly dysfunctional family for the last 15 days, with all the excitement and frustration that such expeditions entail. We were now leaving the Colorado Plateau and making a three day journey home through a part of the country that has been, if anything, even more abandoned than the Plateau: the Basin and Range Province.

After our day of exploring Bryce Canyon, we moved down the highway to Zion National Park for our last evening in Utah. In the morning, we learned about some of the spectacular geology of the wonderful park, and our students were given several hours of free time to hike in the upper canyon. I'd like to show you an entire album of beautiful pictures of one of our most beautiful national parks, but to tell the unvarnished truth...I was tired and worn out! I had explored Zion four weeks earlier, and on this particular morning, I really wanted a...normal breakfast. Mrs. Geotripper and I went down to Springdale, and while the others were struggling up Angel's Landing, or slogging up the river in the Virgin Narrows, we sat sipping mocha and luxuriating our way through a couple of delicious breaksfast burritos at the Cafe Soleil. We were also doing something that had been well nigh impossible for most of the last two weeks: we went online. I even managed a short post that day.

Things were going well enough, and we were just a bit behind schedule after visiting the very cool Dinosaur Trackway museum in St. George. Then things kind of fell apart...

2012 had been a horrific drought year, and for much of our trip, brushfires had been a companion, either in plain sight on the distant hills, or far beyond the horizon. On this day, the fires were a lot closer. It was burning next to I-15 between St. George and Cedar City. And it brought traffic to a dead standstill in the 105 degree heat. Ultimately one of our vans stalled (the food van!), and one of our party ended up in the emergency room with smoke inhalation problems. We were three hours away from our destination and the sun was setting. Ultimately, we left the van and several of our party in Cedar City for the night, and the rest of us headed to Great Basin National Park, arriving at our campsite around midnight.

A new sunrise is a wonderful thing, bringing as it does the promise of a different day. We were in Great Basin National Park, a park with no basin, but with lots of other neat things. The park was established in 1986 to preserve a representative part of the Basin and Range province. It includes Nevada's highest entire mountain (sure, Boundary Peak is a bit higher, but it's mostly in California), a forest that included the oldest living thing on the planet (a bristlecone pine), Nevada's only glacier, and a marvelous limestone cavern: Lehman Cave.

We took the tour of the cavern, which is in good shape for a cave that has been known and explored for more than a century. Some areas were damaged by the early visitors, but most rooms are decorated with a fine variety of speleothems (an overall term for stalactites, stalagmites, columns and all the other features found in caverns).

Those who vandalize caverns usually concentrate on stalactites and soda straws, the speleothems which hang from the ceiling of the cave. Stalagmites, which grow from the floor upwards are sometimes passed over in the less visited caves by souvenir hunters. There are some fine ones in the depths of Lehman (below).

Columns are harder to break apart, and don't look as "cool" in a cave vandal's collection. Some fantastic columns remain in pristine condition at Lehman Cave. Don't get me wrong...people who vandalize and steal from caves are criminals, plain and simple. It's just that in the earlier days, tourists were encouraged to collect a souvenir of their trip. There were so many stalactites in newly discovered caves that it hardly seemed to hurt anything to break off a few. Until they were gone, that is, and a great many holes exist today that were once beautiful caverns in the past.

Lehman Cave is especially noted for the number (300+) of shields. The origin of these disc-shaped speleothems is somewhat enigmatic, and they are not present in most caves. Shields actually usually include two shields with a flat open surface between them (kind of like cymbals).

After our tour, we set out across the Great Basin, on America's so-called "Loneliest Highway". We detoured briefly to look for garnets at the imaginatively named Garnet Hill near Ely, Nevada. We spent a night at Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park outside of Gabbs, Nevada, and the next day we were home, via Mono Lake and Tioga Pass in Yosemite National Park (see here for a description of the sights along that highway; we passed this way in 2011 and I wrote all about it).

And so it was that we too abandoned the Abandoned Lands, but not without developing an understanding of the why the land drew people, and why they left it. There are plenty of lessons for us today in this country, both in the 2 billion year geological history, and in the 12,000 year human history. People inhabit this landscape today, but most can only do so because of the importation of food and energy from elsewhere. What happens when the fuel runs short?  What happens when the years-long drought becomes a decades-long drought? What happens when the water, especially in the Colorado River, is down to a relative trickle? It's beyond ironic that the most precious resource in this arid land is the most important export, slaking the thirst of cities like Las Vegas and Los Angeles and the farms of the Imperial Valley of California. So many questions...

I hope you've enjoyed this blog series! I'll be trying to get all the posts compiled in one place if you are at all interested in catching the flow of the journey.