Tom's National Park Adventure

Today I went to the Lehman Cave tour with Ranger Liz. The tour lasted for a little over an hour. The temperature in the caves is a constant 52 degrees. It was a nice change from the rest of the day! The temperature this afternoon was in the low 90’s.

The caves were rediscovered by a man named Lehman in the 1880’s. He built a house over the natural opening and used to charge $1.00 per person for entrance into the cave. He would give them some candles and assured them that someone would come looking for them if the didn’t come back out in 24 hours! I used the word rediscovered because the local indigenous people had know of the cave and used it for years before Mr Lehman claimed it and made a pretty good living with it.

Up until the 1960’s visitors would take blunt objects and hit the walls to make different tones. The acoustics in this area are incredible. They stopped the practice due to all the damage it was causing to the caves.

It takes about 80 years for one of the Soda straws to grow an inch!

They expect the cave took over 8 million years to be formed.

They used to host events in this area of the cave. When they had a high school in the town of Baker, they used to hold their Prom’s in this room.

The cave’s only current residents are some bats. They use the cave as a birthing place. They raise the pups there until they can fly out and feed themselves

I was planning on doing another fairly long hike this afternoon. However….. the temperature shot up and the area I went to had no shade whatsoever. So I went back to my camp and hid in the shade. I spent the rest of the day reading. Glad I have a good book with me!

Tonight I’m going to two different Ranger talks. One will be about the night sky and how light pollution affects birds. It’s probably the same program I watched in Capital Reef National Park last year. It was a good one then so I expect it will be a good one tonight too.

Tomorrow I’m planning on doing another hike on a trail that is higher up on the mountain, but not so high that I expect to run into lots of snow again. This one will be through a nice wooded area. Lots of shade!