Jewel Cave NM in Black Hills, SD

Friday, June 21, 2024

After spending three days at Custer SP communing with bison, we headed to Jewel Cave National Monument.

(Note, if you’d like to see a blogpost from Custer SP & more photos of bison, leave me a comment. These posts are completely random.)

Before we left home I had purchased tickets online for an Historic Lantern Tour at Jewel Cave. (Note that the nearby Wind Cave is not doing tours this summer as they are replacing an elevator.)

We left Custer SP shortly after 9:00 and stopped for breakfast in the town of Custer at a café called Our Place. A central table was full of older men wearing plaid shirts and various kinds of hats and facial hair. Other tables were full of men in cowboy hats or motorcycle leathers.

The decor included every kind of clock imaginable — cuckoo clocks, mantel clocks, and wall clocks with mechanisms that moved and played music at intervals. Around the top of the walls was a row of pegs holding mugs. Being something of a minimalist myself, I could only wonder when those mugs had last been washed. Do you ever wonder things like that?

The place was packed and we had to wait a long time for our eggs and toast.

We arrived at Jewel Cave NM around 11:00. Since we had some extra time before our cave tour at 2:30, we opted to go on a hike called the Canyons Trail. The map said it was about 3.5 miles, rated moderate to strenuous.

I had dressed for the cave in long pants and a long-sleeved tee. Because we decided to hike impulsively, we neglected to bring water.

A rookie error by experienced hikers!

The trail dropped via switchbacks to the floor of a canyon which was broad and grassy. The few trees, living or dead, were Ponderosa pine so there was very little shade. Most of the walk was exposed to the sun and offered little breeze.

At the other end of the canyon we had to climb up and out. It took us an hour and 45 minutes and I became very red in the face. That’s a lesson to always bring water! It took me a full hour to cool down. (Factor in that Jewel Cave is at 4,000 feet of elevation and we weren’t acclimated.)

Our cave tour gathered at 2:20. When we arrived, I discovered that I had signed up for the wrong tour. Instead of the Historic Lantern Tour we were on the list for the basic Scenic Tour. I expressed consternation. A ranger told me this happens all the time — there’s a glitch with the reservation system (which is handled by recreation.gov). He tried to mollify me by saying that the Scenic Tour actually covers more geology and is a lot less strenuous. The Historic Lantern Tour involves a lot of walking while bent from the waist.

I am not easily mollified, but I gave myself a stern talking-to. After the morning’s hike, perhaps this was best.

Our group of 29 took an elevator into the cave. The ranger was a young woman with a kindergarten-teacher voice.

She told us that the cave was formed by carbonic acid. “Anyone know what that is?”

“It’s what creates the fizz in soda pop,” someone answered.

“If you kept soda in your mouth for 16 million years, what would happen? You’d get a cavity! Well, when a mountain keeps carbonic acid in its mouth that long, the mountain gets a cave - ity.”

The cave itself was quite wonderful with lots of calcite deposits and interesting formations. Doug remembered having toured this cave as a kid on a family trip.

The tour included a fairly extended period of time in the dark, which was fun.

The cave was discovered in 1900 and developed in 1959. The tour went down to a depth of 379 feet. The explored depth so far is about 800 feet. At that point they hit the water table. The leader said they won’t explore underwater, which surprises me.

All exploration and mapping is done by volunteer cavers who descend into the cave for four days at a time. They’ve mapped about 200 miles so far (some earlier this month) and believe there are thousands more miles to explore.

The worst part is not carrying in all their food and drink — but carrying out all the human waste. Yikes.

(Photo of “Cave Bacon”)

We left Jewel Cave NM at 4:00 to head to Devil’s Tower NM.