Thursday, July 18, 2013

7/17 Wind Cave, Black Hills, SD

It was a super-hot day today, so I enjoyed the cool cave air.  This is not Mammoth or Carlsbad, but it was an interesting cave.  No stalactites or stalagmites, but it has some interesting box formations.  It is also a complex cave that has had at least 140 miles of cave passages mapped, but these are nearly all very narrow crawling or stooping passages, not huge rooms.  The rock is limestone and very soft with many cracks, so water seeping down has made thousands of passages at many, many levels.

The original opening to the cave is very small, just big enough for a very skinny person.  Since most of the tour group did not qualify, we took the door and 300 steps down to the main level.


It is hard to see and even harder to photograph, but here are the box formations that were formed by water dripping through cracks in the ceiling.

And this is one of the wider passages.  Even though this area was fairly wide, you still had to watch your head in most of the narrower pathways.

No comments:

Post a Comment