August 2017: Epic "Roadtrip" Part II: Lewis & Clark Caverns

Mighty stalagmites

Lewis and Clark Caverns State Park
You had one job, Lewis and Clark!  One job.  Go and explore the Louisiana Purchase and find out what is there.  One job!  On July 31st, 1805, The Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, camped along Antelope Creek within view of the caverns that would one day bear their names.  And they didn't discover them.  One job, guys and you blew it!

The actual discovery of Lewis and Clark Caverns would have to wait 87 years until 1892 when a couple of ranchers stumbled upon them while hunting elk.  Supposedly they saw steam coming out of the ground and investigated.  They found limestone caverns with strange formations of stalactites and stalagmites and many other kinds of features.  I do not believe that the entire caverns have been explored yet.  Those guys are credited with the discovery.  But like all good discoveries, someone else claimed to have visited the caverns ten years earlier in 1882.  I don't have enough information to make a judgement.

Sixteen years later, in 1908, Theodore Roosevelt declared the 124 acres to be Lewis and Clark Caverns National Monument.  During The Great Depression, the Civil Conservation Corps made improvements on the caverns for ease of visiting, including blasting a tunnel over a hundred yards long from two directions.  They met right in the middle.  That means without GPS or digital mapping, their surveying was really good.  In 1937, Woodrow Wilson removed National Monument status away from the caverns and ownership reverted to the state of Montana.  Now it is part of the Montana State Park program.

Lewis and Clark Caverns is about two hours and forty-five minutes away from my home.  It was a favorite destination when I was a boy.  I think I must have visited the caverns at least five times as a boy and two or three more times as an adult.  The tour is about an hour and a half long and is guided by young people.  I've been going since the early seventies, and the script has not changed in all of that time.  An hour and a half of young people telling "dad jokes."

The Hot Chick's sister arrived with her family and we all headed north for Lewis and Clark Caverns.  The Hot Chick's brother and his family were already with us.  We had a group of fourteen people with three families and a bunch of kids.

The hike to the caverns is about a mile of switchbacks and the elevation gain is about 900 feet.  I think the trail is about a mile and a half from the visitors center to the cave opening,  Along the paved trail are fossilized coral and other marine life.  No one is allowed to enter the cave without a guide, so The Hot Chick and I took our time.  No sense getting all hot and sweaty running up the trail.  The kids had no such discipline.  We made the cave entrance about the same time as the guide and the tour began.

I'm going to get most of the talking out of the way here and then I'll just show a bunch of pictures.  It's that kind of blog post.

The kids playing a strange game at a rest area

I'm pretty sure this is the Jefferson River.  Lewis and Clark named it for President Thomas Jefferson.
They knew which side their bread was buttered.

Lewis and Clark camped right under this mountain, unaware of the cave features and the awesomeness

That's where they camped

Coral

More coral

I like rocks

There's that pesky vulture again

At the cavern entrance, waiting for the young guide, armed with dad jokes

The guide had to give us the rundown of cave etiquette and rules before we could enter.  There are rules about caving that are important.  Bats are an important species and their populations are dwindling.  If you have been in a cave east of the Mississippi, you shouldn't bring anything into a western cave that you took with you in the eastern cave.  There is a fungus that can kill bats and make them abort their young.  I know, bats were scary even before Corona-virus.  There is no flash photography in the first part of the cave where the bats are.  Apparently bats are kind of like humans and don't like having camera flashes blind them.  There is also the talk about not taking any stalactites from the cave and things like that.  Let's go caving.

The original discovery site.  Somehow I began to feel like a character in The Count of Monte Cristo

Fuzzy picture of the stairs down.  Not allowed to use the flash here

Cave popcorn and stalactites

Broken stuff that has fused back on the surface

A really cool stalagmite

I don't remember what this feature was called, there are several different kinds of flowstone in these caverns

Between 1882 and 1908, the discoverer of the caverns used to take tours.  In this room, he allowed visitors to break off a
stalactite and take it as a souvenir.  We will never know what this room could have looked like.  Stupid people.

I think they called these the soda straws

Different kind of flowstone

Stuff like this is everywhere

Large column, where a stalactite and a stalagmite meet

Broken stalactite that shows the growth rings, very much like trees, but made of rock.  I am not sure if this was
broken by earthquake, vandals, or the CCC when they were blasting in the cave.

Cave popcorn

Several windows to shoot through.  At this point in the cave they had certain
features lit with electric light.  They were planning an overhaul of the electrical
system to light the cave with LEDs.  I have seen a photo recently that makes me
believe they have finished that job.

Coolness abounds

I started feeling like I belonged in a Hobbit movie

About this point in the tour, a couple of us noticed a man and his son were kind of outliers in the tour.  They kept hanging back and kept trying to get further and further away from the guide and the group.  It was obvious they had been drinking.  We started hanging back to keep an eye on them.  Sure enough, when the group had gone on, the son started to vandalize a room.  Nothing really bad, but bad enough.  I told him in my 'dad voice' to "Put that down!"  The dad made an excuse and I glared at him and pointed at him and pointed down the path to where the group was and then waited for them to go.  We kept our eyes on them throughout.  They were up to no good.  By the end of the tour, I snitched on them.  Totally ratted them out.

In the last major room of the cavern, I saw them sneak off down a different passageway.  I pointed it out to the guide who radioed in for some security dudes to take care of business.  I'm not normally a snitch, but don't vandalize something like this in front of me.  I can't be a passive observer to that kind of crap.

This is one of the best caverns in the western United States

On and on it goes

They take candlelight tours of the caverns in December and January

I think the dad joke here is that Santa Claus is on top of this one

It keeps on going

And still a different kind of flowstone

In case you are hungry, cave popcorn.  Hard on the teeth though

Steps made by the CCC

I'm not sure why I photographed The Hot Chick's foot

Toward the end of the cave, they started adding colored light

Which made it even more magical, like the first twenty minutes of The Wizard of Oz
and then suddenly, technicolor.

This is really a cool cave system.  I'd recommend you put it on your southwest Montana
trip itinerary.  If  you are a vandal, go somewhere else.  

lots of stuff to look at

The tour is an hour and a half.  About halfway through, the guide turns out all
the lights.  It is so dark, and no light gets down that deep.  You cannot see your
hand in front of your face.  Some people get a little freaked by that.

Some of the features are still growing in the cave.  You are not allowed to touch the cave features because oils on your hands can alter the growth patterns of the stalactites and stalagmites.  Repeated touching can kill the growth of these features.

More colored light

This is the pipe organ in the cathedral room.

This chunk of wood used to hold lanterns in the 1930's

Some of us outside the cave.

Virginia City, Montana
A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about Bannock, Montana which is due west of Virginia City.  Bannock was the territorial capital of Montana and then it shifted to Virginia City.  Lots of crime there, and finally Sheriff Henry Plummer and his gang were hanged by vigilantes.  The jury is out still as to whether Plummer was guilty, but after the hangings the robberies stopped.  Do the math.

Virginia City is a short distance away from Lewis and Clark Caverns, so we stopped on the way home.  We didn't have time to walk around the city, but we did go up to Boot Hill to pay our respects to the men who met their end at a necktie party.

We will visit Virginia City and it's sister, Nevada City another time and I will devote an entire blog post to it.

On boot hill

Vigilante grave.  Offerings left

The markers have been stabilized over time

Probably repainted here and there

More offerings

These men lived hard and died hard.  Sounds like a movie title

Virginia City from Boot Hill.  Virginia City is not technically a ghost town, but the downtown is like a giant open to the public museum.  

Sign

I'm pretty sure outlaws weren't buried this nicely.  Pretty sure this grave is a leading citizen.

Sunset

We love showing people the sights around here.  For being as remote as we are and as sparsely populated, there's a lot of history in our area and a lot of things to see and do.  We know how to show people a good time.


Epic "Roadtrip" Part I:  Yellowstone/Grand Teton

Epic "Roadtrip" Part III:  Teton Dam

Epic "Roadtrip" Part IV:  Total Eclipse of the Sun