International Year of Caves and Karst 2021

This article was originally published in The Midden – Great Basin National Park: Vol. 21, No. 1, Summer 2021.

2021 has been designated the International Year of Caves and Karst. Great Basin joins this celebration and highlights the caves in the Park.

NPS Photo by Gretchen Baker

By Gretchen Baker, Ecologist

Great Basin National Park is participating in the International Year of Caves and Karst 2021, a celebration of our natural underground spaces. This year we also prepare to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the designation of Lehman Caves National Monument on January 24, 2022. A public ceremony will be held at the Park on August 6, 2022.

Some fun stats about caves and karst at Great Basin National Park:

-Lehman Caves was rediscovered in 1885 by Absalom Lehman and opened as Nevada’s first show cave

-Thirty-nine other caves in the Park have since been explored

-The Park is home to the longest cave in Nevada: Lehman Caves, at slightly over 2 miles long

-The Park is home to the deepest cave in Nevada: Long Cold Cave, at over 400 feet deep

-The Park is home to the highest elevation cave in Nevada: High Pit, at over 11,000 feet elevation

-The Park has annual cave rescue practices to ensure visitor and staff safety.

-Numerous measures in Lehman Caves have been enacted to make the cave safer, such as an electrical lighting system, non-slip surfaces on the pathways, handrails, and more headspace in passages that were previously crawlways.

-Annual lint and restoration camps (Covid permitting) help reduce human impacts to Lehman Caves

-Bat gates on several caves help protect the bat populations within them

-Cave management plans outline several other conservation measures, such as fire retardant drops near caves and a wild cave permit system.

-Lehman Caves has 504 cave shields, perhaps the most of any cave in the world

-The condensation corrosion in Lehman Caves (where carbon dioxide has dissolved away rock and speleothems) has recently been recognized as one of the best examples in the world. The NPS has monthly themes and highlights. The next page shows an image for each of the monthly themes.

International Year of Caves and Karst Photo Gallery