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Discovery Hour

To celebrate 125 years of discovery, listen in as we spend an hour each month through 2025 discovering Jewel Cave and the Black Hills with special guest speakers.

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Pollinators of the Black Hills

Transcript

 Hello and welcome to Jewel Cave National Monument’s 125 Years of Discovery Podcast Discovery Hour. Join us this episode as we listen to a presentation on the pollinators of the Black Hills, presented by University of Wyoming student Nina Crawford, recorded on July 5th, 2025. A transcript of this episode is available on our website, www.nps.gov/jeca.

Thank you for listening!

Well, thank you guys for joining me today! My name is Nina, and I'm a PhD student at University of Wyoming, so I'm actually not part of the park service, but I like to think I'm adopted by them because I am doing some research in the parks to learn more about bees and butterflies around here. So today I'm going to talk about what a pollinator is, some of the bees and butterflies you might see around Jewel Cave and on other hikes in the Black Hills of Wyoming and South Dakota, as well as what I'm doing when I go out into the field to learn more about these pollinators. So, I took these pictures: that is a half black bumblebee hanging out there on some showy milkweed, and that is a western tiger Swallowtail, also on some showy milkweed, so we really like milkweed around here. So, starting off, do you guys know what a pollinator is? Does anyone want to try and guess what a pollinator is or what they do? [They go from each flower to flower to spread pollen.] You nailed it. That is like seriously, almost exactly what I wrote on here. So, it’s any organism, which is just a fancy name for a critter that transfers pollen from one plant to another. So, here we have a bumblebee, it’s flying to one flower, and it's a really pretty flower that's attracting the bee with the color of the petals, and it's eating the pollen that's on the flower for some protein, and it's drinking the nectar for some sugar, and while it's munching on the flower, it picks up pollen, so accidentally it gets stuck to its body 'cause pollen's really, really sticky, and then it flies to the next flower 'cause it's not done eating quite yet, and that pollen can fall off; and when pollen is moved from one flower to another, then the flower can make seeds, which then makes more flowers!

So, without pollinators, flowers wouldn't be able to spread throughout the landscape and without flowers, bees and butterflies and other pollinators wouldn't have anything to eat! So, it's a very beautiful relationship between the two different organisms and they couldn't survive without one another. So, what does this look like in real time? Here we have a video that I'll play pretty shortly of a golden northern bumblebee, which is Bombus fervidus, hanging out on some wavy leaf thistle, Cirsium undulatum, which is really popular; it's a native thistle around here, and this is what it looks like in real time, so that bee is getting all up in there, it's eating all the nectar in the pollen and you can kind of see, if you look really closely on its behind, it's got lots of little speckles of pollen, and so when it goes to the next flower to have its dessert, it's gonna drop off some more of that pollen and the wavy leaf thistle can make way more flowers throughout the whole landscape, so, super helpful relationship between the two.

Alright, I've gave you guys some hints about what a pollinator is. Can anyone think of any kind of insects or animals that might be a pollinator? We just saw one. [Bees.] Great job! So, when we talk about bees, that's actually really interesting 'cause there's lots of different kinds of bees. So, the one that a lot of people are really familiar with are the honeybees, but honeybees are actually not native to the U.S. They're from Europe, like this European honeybee right here, and they are intended for agriculture. So, we'd love to eat honey. They are actually the only kind of bee that can make honey and beeswax. So, people have large farms, sometimes they're beekeepers themselves and they raise hives of honeybees to eat that honey. But there are actually thousands of other kinds of bees.

Even in this little area of the Black Hills of Wyoming and South Dakota, there's over 300 species. We get bees like sweat bees and bumblebees. There's lots of different kinds and it takes a really, really trained eye to be able to identify the different species of bees, and that's where I come in. I sit at a lab all day and I look at bees under a microscope, and I look at things like patterns on their wings, what color their abdomen is, if they have special hair under their legs, and stuff like that. And I just love it. It's so, so much fun. I hope to be a taxonomist that works in a museum that just IDs bees all day long. But there are just so many different kinds of bees that are all unique to North America, so even in the US there's over 4,000 species of bees, and honeybees and bumblebees are actually the only social ones. The majority of bees around here are actually solitary, so they live alone. They don't have a hive.

Moving on from bees, you already guessed it, butterflies are another huge pollinator. There's lots of different kinds around here, and I'm gonna go through some slides later that show all the common ones that you can see around here. They're just really beautiful, really great pollinators. Does anyone else have any guesses about what other pollinators there are? [Bats.] Nice! Okay, you absolutely killed that, but that's a little bit later. So, some other insect pollinators that we have are beetles - lots of beetles are good, great pollinators. Moths are really, really great pollinators, especially during the night. Some flowers only bloom at night, and those are moth-pollinated flowers. We also have ants, so sometimes when you pick a batch of peonies, they might be covered in ants. That's because peonies are pollinated by ants, which can sometimes be a nuisance when you bring 'em inside. Um, flies are another really great pollinator. Sometimes they will mimic the way that bees look, such as this bee fly absolutely named here, as well as hover flies are really good bee mimics and they're just trying to blend in as a bee and be like, “I'll sting you if you get too close to me”, but they don't actually sting. Wasps, as much as sometimes we don't like wasps, they are also really important pollinators. They have a really cool relationship with figs, that they're a fig pollinator and they eat their way in the figs and lay their eggs, and then when those eggs hatch, they help pollinate the fig. Birds, like you mentioned. So, something like a hummingbird is a really, really great pollinator 'cause they have those really, really long beaks that can help get into those flowers that have really deep petals. So those are made specifically for hummingbird pollinators; and then bats, great job! No one ever thinks about bats as pollinators because they don't pollinate a ton in this area. They're more tropical pollinators. But they eat fruit and visit flowers to drink nectar, much like all of these other pollinators do, and they help transfer pollen in that way, ‘cause a pollinator is just anything that transfers pollen from one flower to another. Alright, and then a quick shout out. All these photos are from Joel Sartor, who is a photographer with National Geographic and he's doing a project called The Photo Arc. He's trying to take a picture of every single organism on planet Earth and it's really, really cool, so I highly suggest checking it out. There's a couple of documentaries about him. Yeah! [Do humans count as pollinators?] That is a great question. Humans can be pollinators, especially for certain plants like pumpkins really need specialist pollinators, so sometimes people go out with like paint brushes and they'll pick up the pollen and then drop it into the next pumpkin, so then you would be a pollinator! Great question.

So why should we care? So, there's a lot of different reasons that pollinators are really important, but starting off with the human aspect of it, their huge agricultural importance. So, we have a graphic here that explains all the ways that pollinators are important to agriculture, and it kind of boils down to one and every three bites of food is thanks to a honeybee. Honeybees are really important tools for agriculture. In fact, there's a lot of different orchards such as almond orchards that will rent honeybees and they'll bring in their hives and they will pollinate all the almond trees and then that we get almonds. So, over half of the global leading crops benefit from pollinators, 35% of food from global food benefits from pollinators. So, without pollinators, we would not have a lot of the food that we love and enjoy on our plates. But beyond just agriculture, they're also critically important to our ecosystem. All of these flowers pictured here are thanks to pollinators. They're all insect-pollinated plants, and approximately 80% of all flowering plants are pollinated by animals. So, if we didn't have birds and bats, and bees and butterflies, and beetles and flies, and all those pollinators that I talked about, we wouldn't have beautiful wildflowers. You wouldn't be able to enjoy them on your trail hikes. Other organisms that eat flowers like deer and elk and mountain goats would not have their food supply, and then critters that eat those animals like raptors and mountain lions and coyotes would lose their food source too. So, we commonly regard pollinators as a keystone species, which means that when we lose pollinators, the rest of the ecosystem kind of collapses around them.

So, it's really important that we are protecting our pollinators, because, unfortunately, our pollinators are in danger. They're facing a variety of threats globally. Whether it is they're losing food and habitat resources due to agriculture expansion or urban expansion or pollution is a huge one - pathogens, there's a lot of different diseases that pollinators are struggling with right now, as well as pesticides, which we'll talk a little bit more about later, but even in these public lands that are dedicated to conservation like national parks, we're still seeing a 75% decrease over the past 27 years. And as upsetting as this might be, hope is not lost, I promise. You guys can help in a variety of ways. So, limiting chemical use on lawns is a huge one. People ask me about this a lot. Of course, I'm gonna be like, hmm, maybe no insecticides. Neonicotinoids that are a really commonly found ingredient in insecticides have been proven to be entirely fatal to bees and other pollinating insects. It disrupts their nervous system. But even something like Roundup, which is an herbicide, has shown to have 90% mortality for insects, so pretty sad. I'm here to give you a really great excuse to not mow your lawn during the month of May, so you can blame it on me. “No Mow May” means that you don't mow your lawn for the whole month of May and leave woody debris because that's really great nesting habitat for these solitary bees - there you can see a little bee peeking out on some undisturbed pile of soil so you don't have to do yard work for the whole month of May. And then planting pollinator friendly plants is huge. Some of you guys might not be from around here, so I encourage you guys to look up what is native in your own home, but here, milkweed, minarda(?), asters, and native thistles are really great food for pollinators, and I encourage you guys to plant that, something that blooms throughout the whole summer. So, having some springtime flowers and having some late summer flowers can really provide food for pollinators throughout the whole season that they are active.

Alright, moving on to some pollinators you can see around here. I'm gonna be going through some of the really broad families of butterflies you guys might see on your hike. There are nearly a hundred different species of butterflies in the area, so unfortunately, I don't have time to go over all of them, but I'll give you some really big groups so when you're on your walk and you see one whizzing past you, you might be able to get an idea about what it could be.

So, starting with the blues, which is in the family Lycaenidae, these are really tiny blue butterflies. They're about the size of a quarter, and they love grassland and mowed areas, so when I'm walking down Canyons Trail or around Roof Trail, I feel like I see a lot of these kind of hovering pretty low. They will do this behavior called puddling, which is kind of seen in the bottom picture there, where if there's a little body of water, like a puddle, then they will all gather and drink up all the water and get all the nutrients that that water leached out of the soil, so it's really fun to see them, they'll all hang out there. That orange one with the little orange band is a Melissa's blue, which I've seen plenty around here. And the one of the top corner is a silvery blue, so very fun. These ones are guys I feel like are pretty common.

Next, we have the sulfurs. As you can tell, scientists are really creative when they come up with common names for butterflies, and these are called the sulfurs because of that sulfury color. So, we have two major species in this area. Over here we have the orange sulfur, and on the far end there we have the clouded sulfur, and they hybridize sometimes, so it can be really difficult to like distinguish exactly what species they are, but they're medium size. They're often found in grasslands and on flowers. I see them a lot on the purple, um, woolly vervane(?) that's blooming right about now, um, as well as native thistles, like that wavy leaf thistle, so really fun. I feel like I see these guys a lot and I have some up there too, so afterwards, if you wanna come check out what the butterflies look like, I have plenty.

Next is fritillaries, and these are a bit of a larger butterfly. They kind of look like monarchs 'cause they're those large orange monarchs or large orange butterflies, but they love meadows and they love milkweed and thistle. They're more common than a monarch, I would say, but they're about the same size, and it can be really difficult to distinguish a species between them, so I don't even try, when I'm out in the field for the most time, I just write them down as fritillaries, except for that special guy right there is the Regal Fritillary, which is proposed for listing under the Endangered Species Act, but they are a little bit easier to ID when they're flying past you. Can anyone figure out what is different about this butterfly that the other ones don't have? It's kind of tricky. [The dot.] Yes. Yeah, so the dots at the bottom are a huge one, and this one has black on the hind wings there at the bottom, so it's easy when they're flying past me. If I see that chunk of black, then I know it's a regal fritillary that is proposed threatened, so that's good data to have, and hopefully if you're lucky, you'll see one out in the field.

Next is the beloved Monarch and some of its siblings. This is the family Nymphalidae, which doesn't have a snappy name like some of the other ones, but they are the brush footed butterflies, and there's a really wide variety, but they're mostly larger to medium size. This is the Monarch, which is also proposed threatened. Unfortunately, this past winter was the lowest number of recorded overwintering monarchs in recorded history, so there is definitely a fight to preserve them. Planting milkweed is huge because they only lay eggs on milkweed species. That way when the eggs hatch, there are caterpillars and they can eat the milkweed right away, which makes them poisonous to other insects, and it's a way they ward off predators.

So, we're hoping to see some more monarchs. They're the ones that migrate across the whole country, so they overwinter when it gets really, really cold, the monarchs will fly to either California or down to Mexico, where it's nice and warm and they'll hang out in the trees and wait for winter to pass in North America. Some other common Nymphalidae that I see are the Red Admiral, which are medium size. They're all black and you're looking for these orange bands is the best way to ID them, but they look really similar to painted ladies over there on the right, um, but those I feel like are starting to come out more; they're more of a late summer butterfly, whereas these guys are early summer, so I feel like right now they're switching.

Next, we have skippers, which are really tiny guys, and like their names suggest, when they fly, they kind of skip. They're really fun to watch fly around. They're pretty small except for this guy. This is the silver spotted skipper, which is a little bit bigger, but I see them mostly in grasslands. These butterflies really like to hang out on grass and rest there rather than flowers, and they're kind of muted colors: it can be kind of dark like this dusky wing here, or more orangey like the Argo skipper up there in the top right corner, so really fun to see. I feel like I see them pretty frequently around here.

Next, we have some favorites, which are the swallowtails, which I definitely see a lot in Jewel Cave because I love the forested ecosystem, which there are plenty of Ponderosa pine in this parkland. They're really, really large butterflies. I have some pinned up there, and the most common ones that I see around here are the Western Tiger Swallowtail and then the black Swallowtail over there, and they're just like really fun to see. They do this behavior called tree topping. So, they'll come check you out, and then when they decide that you're a predator, they fly high up into the treetops where you know that you can't reach them, especially when I'm chasing them down with a net. It is like just the most aggravating thing in the world because they just fly straight up and I can't get 'em that way, but really fun to see. I see lots of them around here.

Alright, we're almost done with our butterflies. So next we have Checker Spots and Crescents, these remind me a lot of the blues, they're just kind of an orangey color, so they just, they display the same puddling behavior where if there's a puddle and there's some water nearby, they'll come hang out, drink the water, and they're about the same size as blues. They're just orangey black and they have that checkerboard pattern on them, so really, really cool. This is a Pearl Crescent right here, and I think that's a, I can't remember what that guy is. Alright.

And then our last group of butterflies that I see really commonly around here are the Satyrs, part of family Satyrinae, and their uniting factor is either the butterflies that have the fake eyeballs on them to ward off predators and make them think that they're a little bit bigger and a little bit scarier than they actually are. So, over here we have the common wood nymph, which these are starting to come out and they just come out in waves. There was one last season in Devil's Tower during a 45 minute transect. We counted over a hundred just walking through a site, so they're really, really abundant. They love the forested areas. They feel like they hang out a lot on grass and dead wood because they blend in really well with the dead wood. And then over there is the common ringlet, another medium sized butterfly, really common here during springtime. And they like the grass as well. So, yeah, they have the fake eyeballs on them, which I think are pretty cool.

Alright, moving on to bees next, like I mentioned, there's over 300 different species of bees in the area, so I can't go through all 300 species, but I will go over some large groups that people normally ask me about. That is my finger right there with another, I think that actually might be a brown belted, bumblebee on my finger there, 'cause normally we cool them down after we catch them, and then I can take fun pictures like this while they're warming up and they hang onto my finger to get my body heat.

So, as we were just talking about bumblebees, everyone loves bumblebees. I absolutely love bumblebees. I just think they're the cutest thing ever. They all belong to one genus, which is the genus Bombus, and like I mentioned, they are social, so they live in a hive. They can be pretty big. Some of the biggest ones get up to be nearly an inch in size, and then the smallest ones are about a quarter inch, and here are three different species. They're all large and fuzzy, and I think these are the most common ones that I see. I think my data would agree too. Over here we have the Golden Northern Bumblebee, which is Bombus fervidus. In the middle we have Bombus rufocinctus, which is the red belted bumblebee, which I think is aptly named 'cause he's got kind of like a ginger belt on there. And then the far end, we have Bombus vagans, which is the half black bumblebee, so you're looking for a bee that has two little sections of yellow, and then the rest is black.

Next, we have sweat bees, which is a huge variety of bees. This is a bunch of different genera. They all look really, really different, but they all have one thing in common: that they like to drink your sweat. So, it's happened to me in the field and I've been chilling, writing down some data, they'll fly up to me, land on my skin and lick up my sweat to get some salt in their diet. So, they can be huge. They can be different sizes and shapes and colors. They can be really small like that Halictus ligatus hanging out on the little flower there, or they can be larger, like some of these Agapostemon or maybe more the size of your thumbnail, and they can just be really vibrant colors. I see a lot of the Agapostemon out, so if you look in blooms of flowers, you might find one hanging out too! They're just so fun. I love them.

Next, we have mason bees. These are the ones that will dig into wood to make their nest where they'll lay one to three eggs per season 'cause they are solitary. They don't live in a hive. They live all alone. They're about medium-sized and they can often be kind of metallic in color, so there you got blue ones over here, or they can be kind of gold and look more like a honeybee, like that guy over there. So, really, really fun to see. I like these ones a lot. They're really, really round is the other thing that I feel like I see with them.

Next, we have the mining bee, which is the genus Andrena, and these are the ones that look the closest to honeybees to me. They’re medium size, I find them hanging out a lot on the prairie cone flowers, and the purple cone flowers is a really good way to find them, but yeah, they kind of just look like honeybees to me. They're easy to mix up and, they nest in the ground. That's why they're called mining bees. They make the little holes in the ground, kind of like the picture that I showed for the No Mow May picture.

Next is one of my favorite. It's called the Longhorn Bees, and there's a couple different genus that belong to this group, but they all have really cool pollen pants on, is what I call them, is their scopa. They have special hair that is branched. It kind of looks like they got really bad split ends, but it's a really good way for them to hang onto the pollen for them to eat later and then to bring to other flowers, and then the males all have really long antennae, which is where the longhorn names comes from, so it's like really, really fun to see those out in the field. All the males don't have a nest that they have access to. Only females have nests, so sometimes we've got, really early in the morning you might see some male longhorn bees hanging out on flowers, 'cause that's their kind of like bachelor pad that they hang out on overnight. It's really fun.

Alright, now that I went over all those bees, I want to talk about my research next, and I really wanna emphasize the importance of the National Park Service in their role for research, whether it is cultural research and people are doing archeology or anthology research, or it's something more like ecology, where we're studying bats or bees or cave systems. The National Park Service is a really great way for to support research, as it contains ecosystems that are protected from outside influence, and by supporting parks, you're supporting research, so thank you to you all for visiting parks and helping support scientists in their effort to learn how to conserve the natural world.

So, context for my research, we kind of already talked about this a bit, that we're seeing this decline in pollinators, and some of the major causes of decline are pesticides, like I mentioned, and then that habitat disruption, whether it's fragmentation for agriculture or urbanization, but my research is mostly focusing on how do herbicides and prescribed burn, which is a commonly used land management tactic, used to get rid of invasive plant species or prevent wood like forests from taking over prairies. How do those two land management actions influence pollinators? And since we know that there are so many pollinators, I'm specifically looking at bees and butterflies. And so, the parks requested an inventory of all the bees and butterflies in their parks, and we decided to pair that inventory with an investigation about their land management techniques so that they can balance land management goals, like treating invasive plant species with pollinator conservation.

So, my research takes place at four parks, including one that we're sitting in right now. So, I am sampling for three years from 2024 to 2026. So, this is my second field season, and I get to sample at Devil's Tower, Jewel Cave, Wind Cave, and Mount Rushmore, ‘cause all of these parks implement land management for invasive plants, um, which they all spray herbicide, and then those three on the bottom do prescribed burns. I sample from June to August, and I visit each of these 37 sites three times throughout the summer, and I've set it up in a way that's called a BACI design, which stands for Before / After Control Impact, so I sample for pollinators before herbicide and burn, as well as after, and then I have sites where there is herbicide and burn and say, so there aren't, so I can compare the effects of the action. It's kind of convoluted a little bit, but.

So, the major question that I'm asking is how do prescribed burns and herbicide application alter the abundance and diversity of pollinators in the Northern Great Plains? And so some more specific questions that I have along with this overarching one is how does the time since burn, so say we have an area that was burned 25 years ago at an area that was burned two years ago. How do the pollinators differ between those two sites? As well as how does the burn season, so if we do a burn in the fall and a burn in the spring, does that look different? And then with herbicide, I wanna look at the ingredients and see how changes in ingredients might affect pollinators as well, if there's any sub-lethal effects. So, the herbicide might outright kill the bees or the butterflies, but it also might make them really sleepy and drowsy and unable to do their job.

Next, the other question I'm asking is, like, what bees and butterflies are even in these parks? My research is the first inventory of pollinators in both of these parks ever, so I am building a database of what bees and butterflies are here, as well as their common floral associations, so what flowers these bees and butterflies are visiting, what is their favorite snack? And so alongside that, I'm also looking for changes in plant pollinator networks, so like what they're eating and what flowers are visiting, as well as if invasive plants find their way into those networks - if invasive plants are really good food for these pollinators.

I get all my data in a couple different ways. So, one of them is active netting, so I have a butterfly net there with me. It is a very cartoonishly, like large looking butterfly net. It feels like a video game when I go out and play. And sample and collect data, but I walk throughout a site for 45 minutes, and I catch bees and butterflies that I might see, and I transfer them, and I'm gonna keep them. For butterflies, it's a lot easier for me to identify them down to species in the field. So, I only need to collect one of each species. That way the parks has an example to look at; I don't need to collect every single one. That way we can practice kind of a conservative collection. But for the bees, like I showed, I need to sit in front of a microscope and ID them all, so every time I catch a bee, I do keep it, except for queen bumblebees, because they'll raise a whole colony. So, if I take a queen bumblebee, that's kind of like taking hundreds of bees, so I try not to do that, and then species of conservation concern, 'cause there are some bumblebees that are proposed to be listed under the Endangered Species Act. So, I essentially walk throughout a site, and I see a butterfly, and then I go after it, and I chase it with my net, and I grab it, and I take it back with me. I put the specimens in a freezer to euthanize them humanely, and then I take it back to the lab where I will pin them, and they will become a museum display that I will give to the National Park Service. So, I have some specimens with me after I'm done speaking. You are welcome to come check them out and see what a pinned insect looks like.

Next, I have blue vein traps. So, sometimes if you're in the area you might see these out 'cause I'm deploying them at the four parks in the area, but it is a form of passive traps, so I kind of set it and forget it. I put 'em out in the field for 24 to 48 hours and they just look like a giant flower to them. They have this UV reflectance that tells the bee “Look, I'm a giant flower, come pollinate me”, but there's actually nothing in them. It's a completely dry trap, and I only put them out, like I said, for 24 to 48 hours and the bees just flood into them. They're still alive when I find them, so I'm able to release again those queen bees and species of conservation concern. And this is kind of what they look like. I hang them on a piece of rebar at the height of the vegetation and they collect some bees. It's not a ton. Again, I don't wanna over-collect and take away all these important pollinators from the area, but they do get a good idea of what's in the area that I wasn't able to see with my net, and it's just another way for me to collect bees.

Next, highly technical, we have some GoPro cameras (not actually, science can get really creative in some ways). So, I put these GoPro cameras with a special kind of lens fitted on them that allows me to see really small things called a macro lens, and I install it on a blooming flower for about an hour while I'm walking my transects, and this is gonna give me data about who is visiting what flowers and if their behavior changes. So, this gets into that question of sublethal effects. Maybe they have to rest a little bit more after those herbicides sprayed, or maybe they're walking a little weird, or they're grooming more. So, this is what some of the video looks like. Here we can see is a green sweat bee or an Agapostemon species is coming to visit this purple cone flower, Echinacea angustifolia, and it's visiting, and it's getting some of that pollen off of the flower. It's eating and drinking nectar, and it's collecting that pollen to bring to another flower. So now I have this piece of data that tells me that green sweat bees like visiting purple cone flowers.

Alright, next up we have something new that I'm developing and helping to publish steps on how other people can implement this in their research, which includes nesting blocks. So, I made 40 blocks of pine wood. I drilled 55 holes into each of the blocks, so you can do the math about how much drilling I did, but my hands still hurt thinking about it, and this way I can install them in sites that have herbicide applied to them to see what the nesting rate is. So, maybe the herbicide is making pollinators so sick that they can't lay eggs, they can't build nests, and this is how I'm gonna get to the root of that question. So I hang them up, and hopefully, since these bees are solitary, they only just need one little hole to go into and lay their eggs, and then they plug it up, and they wait, and they leave little pollen snacks for their babies. The eggs will hatch, they'll eat the pollen, and they'll make their way out of the hole. So, I put two blocks per site. I install it just in the process of now checking them, 'cause they've been installed for one month, and then I'll collect them at the end of the summer, bring them all the way back to University of Wyoming, and then hopefully they will hatch and I'll have a bunch of baby bees and I'll be able to see if, are they laying eggs? And if they are, are those eggs healthy enough that they can hatch and then become bees? So, there on the right side of the picture I took last week, it's really difficult to see, but in some of the rows, like, let's see, like B1, C1, D1, they're all actually plugged up with mud, meaning a mason bee. It came around and laid an egg and plugged it up. It decided it was a good enough one-bedroom apartment. We signed the lease and now hopefully those eggs will hatch later in the winter, and we'll see some healthy bees!

Alright, like I mentioned, this is my second field season, so I actually do have some data from my first field season, which was last summer. We did see some species of conservation concern. We saw the regal fritillary pictured there at the top. We saw that at Wind Cave, and we also saw that at Mount Rushmore. The western bumblebee, Bombus occidentalis, is also proposed for listing under the Endangered Species Act, and we saw that at Devil's Tower and at Mount Rushmore, and then the monarch butterfly, we saw lots at Devil's Tower, which was great, and we also saw it at Wind Cave, so really exciting to see some of those species that we're a little bit more worried about. Um, I observed over 1800 butterflies, which was great. I collected about a hundred over 28 different species, so that was really great to get finally, a list of some species that occur in these parks. I collected over 2,500 bees, which means I have to pin them all, ID them all, and then prep, prepare them for that museum display, so it's a lot of work, but it's work that I really enjoy doing, and then I have over a hundred hours of footage from those GoPro cameras, and I need to watch and see if there's any visitors to any of the flowers that I installed them on, so really great data and will take me a while to get through.

And then what's next? Field season two and three are coming up, which includes the post burn data, so some of these parks are hoping to do prescribed burns, both this fall and next spring, which means when I sample next summer, it will be all data that help paint the picture of what pollinators look like post burn. I have to keep IDing bees. They're in the top right corner is what some of my bees from last field season look like, so I need to go through, look at them under a microscope and decide what species they are if I'm able to get down that far into the taxonomy. There's still a lot of missing gaps about how to exactly identify all the bees in the Western U.S., so hopefully more people are getting onto writing that. This is what it looks like when I look at them underneath a microscope. And I'm looking at things like, what's the size of this cell? Is this a point or a rounded area? So, it's pretty intricate, but it's really fun to be able to look at all these beautiful specimens under a microscope all day. I am creating those plant pollinator networks, so beyond just looking at the, um, observation videos, I'm able to take pollen from them - some of these bees and butterflies - and I can send it off to get identified using DNA, and they can tell me exactly what plant that pollen came from. So, it helped me understand, oh, even if I didn't see this bee on wild bergamot, it actually did visit that at some point and decided to keep some of that pollen, so, really helpful thanks to DNA meta bar coding is what it's called. It's a very fancy name. And then I have lots of video footage to watch that little video of that green sweat bee flying onto that purple cone flower. I have lots more video of that to analyze. I write down all of their behavior at all points in the video, so it's a little time staking, but it's not a bad job just to sit around and watch pollinators pollinate all day.

Alright, and then I wanna give a special thank you to my advisor, Dr. Alicia Tronstad and the lab taxonomist Brian Tronstad, as well as my lab members. Madison Manning is my lab tech or my field tech. She is awesome. She actually went caving this morning, so she couldn't come today, she was still washing all the manganese off of, out of her hair, so, but she's awesome. I would not be able to collect this data without her as well as everyone at all the parks, the staff, I could not do without you. I need people to light these fires and spray this herbicide and get excited about pollinators, so huge thank you, and I'm happy to take any questions or if people wanna come up and check out my equipment and some of my specimens that I have, they're welcome to do so as well.

[Applause]

Join PhD student Nina Crawford and learn about the pollinators of the Black Hills.

Black Hills Gold Rush and settling of Rapid City

Transcript

 Hello and welcome to Jewel Cave National Monument's 125 years of Discovery Podcast Discovery Hour. Join us this episode as we listen to a presentation on the Black Hills Gold Rush and settling of Rapid City. Presented by Mark Slocum of the Journey Museum, recorded on June 25th, 2025. A transcript of this episode is available on our website, www.nps.gov/jeca.

Thank you for listening.

So welcome to Jewel Cave’s Discovery Hour. [Yes.] Is that what it's called? My name is Mark Slocum. I'm the Deputy Director and Director of Collections at the Journey Museum in Rapid City. Today I'm going to talk to you a little bit about the Black Hills Gold Rush and Rapid City’s place in that, tell you a little bit about the Journey, and encourage you to go.

Has anyone visited the Journey Museum before? Couple. Okay. If you get a chance, come down to Rapid and see the Journey. This is what the outside looks like. It's a little strange building, because the architecture was designed to look like the actual uplift of the Black Hills geologically. It's surrounded by these large boulders, which represent the Red Racetrack, which is part of a Lakota legend.

And exhibits range from the full history, science, and cultures of the Black Hills. So, anything you want to know about the history of the Black Hills is at the Journey, from the geology, how the hills were formed, the dinosaurs that lived in western South Dakota, millions of years ago, as well as the prehistoric people, the Lakota, Native Americans, the gold rush and the pioneers, and the history beyond that. Our collection includes over 20,000 items, several thousand artifacts, artwork, specimens like this, taxidermy, a bald eagle that was collected around the turn of the century along with about 300 other birds by a local, actual undertaker who went into taxidermy too, on the side in Rapid City. Also, we have a human hair wreath, Civil War field kit, as well as many more things.

Black Hills Research Library, over 110,000 historic images that you can see online, and I wanted to pack a bunch of those into this presentation today too, because I'm a visual person and I really like photographs. I'll put in a lot of dates because this is about kind of like a timeline of what's happening through the Hills, but a lot of interesting pictures and stories to go along with that.

So the Black Hills, we all came here for a reason. It's a really special place, and it has been for a million years, millions of years. Some of the oldest rocks found in the world can be found in the Black Hills, and that's the Harney Peak granite that is about 2.9 million years ago, and that starts in the center. So if you were to imagine the Black Hills geology as many different layers, like a cake, but a balloon was inflated under the cake, it all erupted, and erosion blew that out so that the oldest layers are in the middle and the newest layers out to the Badlands are furthest away.

This map is really cool. It is both satellite and digital editing of the Black Hills. You can see here I-90 and Rapid City, you move back up I-90 towards Sturgis. You can see Bear Butte in this picture. It looks a little weird. And then keep going around Deadwood back here. I believe Harney Peak is over on this side and it wraps around up into Sturgis and Belle Fourche. This little guy is Devil's Tower over in Wyoming. Well, let's see here. [What’s the city in the middle?] This is Rapid City right here. [The one in the middle of the Black Hills?] This, I believe, is just… That's a good question. I believe that's just rock, like the Needles or something like that.

The Black Hills are called — so, which is the Lakota name? Pahá Sápa, because from the distance they look black. They are the heart of their entire universe, and very sacred to the Lakota people. Also, another nickname we have at the Journey Museum is Island in the Plains, because it looks like an island out in the middle of the plains. People have been attracted to the Black Hills for over 10,000 years.

This is an exhibit at the Journey Museum of the Jim Pitts site. You can see the archeological work on the front, and in the back is the Paleo people. This was discovered in the 1990s; number one by archeolo— well, actually, by the highway department putting in a new highway. They had to stop and do a really quick excavation of the site. They found Goshen and Clovis points, like some that you can see here. Oop, that's my blank screen. As well as the— which showed this had been occupied that whole time for 10,000 years. The newest objects they found were old beer cans, a 1946 penny. So really significant site.

Moving several hundred years, all of South Dakota and surrounding states become the ancestral lands of the Oceti Sakowin — which I'm saying wrong, I apologize — or the Seven Council Fires. That makes up the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota people. This is where they traveled, you could say migratory, following the buffalo, because that was their main source of food. The buffalo was used nearly to completion to build tools, housing, the teepee, everything like that for several hundreds if not thousands of years. These are a couple pieces from the Sioux Indian Museum collection at the Journey, as well as some photographs here.

So let's go to when the middle of the country was really opened up. Before 1803, the Louisiana Purchase, this was all French territory, claimed by France. We actually discovered in Fort Pierre, in the middle of the state on the Missouri River, this plate, which is by the Vérendrye brothers, they laid this plate in the side of a mountain, of a hill, in Fort Pierre, claiming all of this land for France. Actually wasn't discovered until the 1940s by high school kids playing on the side of a field. That can now be seen at the State Museum.

In Pierre here, you have Lewis and Clark. They made their way through South Dakota in about 1804. They met Native Americans, but they never actually saw the Black Hills. They just heard about it. This brings into the Dakota Territory fur trade, which happened from 1817 to nearly the 1860s. When everybody thinks about the fur trade, they think of beaver pelts for making top hats and other clothing.

As the fur trade progressed, our fur trade was towards the end of the actual big fur trade, towards the 1840s. And the buffalo were actually what were sought after for not only winter clothing, but they were found to be much stronger than cow belts in machinery. Now, these leather belts would be buffalo hide and be much stronger.

All of that hunting led to, you know, they would just take the hide, leave the body. The planes were covered in bones. And later, they discovered that these bones could be used for different things such as glue… several things. I can't remember them all right now, but you can see. Then the bone collectors went through the planes, collected them all.

This is actually a stack of buffalo skulls in around the 1860s. So the buffalo unfortunately went almost extinct, later brought back, and we do have herds now today. During the fur trade, I like telling the stories of the early fur trappers because they were tough individuals.

A man named Jedediah Smith made it near Buffalo Gap, which is kind by Hot Springs, the Mammoth Site. And in 1823, he was attacked by a grizzly bear. We don't have grizzly bear in the Black Hills. I'll show you another slide later that does show a grizzly bear, but they were around at the time. And he survived that. But his comrade, Jim Clyman, actually reattached his scalp and he lived a very long life.

You'll also remember a South Dakotan that was from a famous movie called The Revenant. If anybody remembers The Revenant with Leonardo DiCaprio, he plays Hugh Glass. That was up near Lemmon, northern part of the state. And he was attacked by a grizzly bear and walked nearly 300 miles to Camp Kiowa, I'm not sure, near Fort Pierre, to survival.

Going further, the United States does establish the Great Sioux Reservation, which pretty much… eastern South Dakota we had homesteaders, western South Dakota and adjoining areas were hunting grounds, but the Black Hills were still part of the Great Sioux Reservation. It was illegal for settlers to move into the Hills.

A few years later under, I believe it was Colonel Custer at the time, and once becomes General Custer. 1874 leads a massive expedition from Fort Lincoln in North Dakota down through the hills, and some say it was officially to look for locations for a fort to protect the Black Hills from settlers moving in. There was also rumors of gold for many years in the Hills. And at this time, we were right after the Civil War, so the country was in a depression. There were a lot of veterans out of the job, and another gold rush would really be a great spark for our economy.

The photo, it was photographed by William H. Illingworth, which I'll talk about in a minute. But there were over 1,200 men, 110 wagons with horses, cattle. 7th Cavalry, along with one woman. She was an African American woman. She was named Sarah Campbell, or Aunt Sally. So the very first non–Native American woman in the Black Hills was African American. She was Custer's cook, and actually later years prospered and had her own claims in the Black Hills. Gold was discovered on French Creek near Custer, and within a year, over 4,000 people had illegally entered the Black Hills.

This is where I have the show and tell, so hopefully this will get you guys interested. The first set of photographs by William Illingworth on the Custer Expedition were all made in stereo view. It's two photos that are set right off side to each other, so if you look through them through a stereo viewer, you can actually see — if you have glasses, you have to move them — a 3D image.

Now this is wagon trains coming through Castle Creek. If you can't, if it doesn't look focused, you can move this piece of wood back and forth, but take that and pass it around and try and look through there. Your mom and dad might need to help you.

Okay, so Custer Expedition was primarily July and August. And news had spread across the country. And even by December, the first large expedition of miners came, called the Gordon Party, which was 26 men and one woman. Should we take a break so they could do that for the recording? [Sure, you know…] I don't mind. It's your recording.

So the Gordon Stockade. Has anybody seen that over by Custer? Yeah, that has been burned down and rebuilt several times. But they spent the winter there. And removed by the military in April of 1875, although many people from that expedition did come back, including that one woman, Annie Tallent, who ended up writing The Dakotahs; or the Last Hunting Grounds of the Black Hills. I encourage you to read that book, though it does have very racist undertones in the way that people spoke back then, so keep that in mind when you're reading it.

So, of those thousands and thousands of miners that came, we had booming towns like Deadwood, Keystone, and camps, other mining camps. But several people failed. They didn't do a good job. And this group was over in Palmer Gulch where there's a campground now, led by John Brennan here in the middle, and they were down on their luck. So in February of 1876, they decided they would try a different way to get rich and look for an area to become an economic hub, to supply the miners coming into the Black Hills, because there was really no way to get your supplies unless it was all the way from Fort Pierre or other locations on the Missouri River.

These gentlemen here, Sam Scott and Tom Ferguson, helped lay out the town, but after a few days, it grew to about 50 people, and on February 25th, they decided to lay out the town. Something that I've been, I just recently discovered is that about the same time, near Canyon Lake, Rapid City, this fellow named California Joe was setting up his own city, but that was forgotten within a couple years, and no one really remembers that.

Founders' campsite. So have you guys been to Rapid, did you say you had? Rapid City? [Just drove through it.] You drove through it. Have you driven through Rapid yet? Yeah? So on Omaha, one of our big streets, you'll see a big hill with an M on it. And that's also a park. That's called Founders Park in Omaha Drive.

This is where the founders of Rapid City settled for the first night. Into that large sandstone cliff, they all carved their names. This is a early historian pointing to John Brennan, the leader of that group. Which it's really impossible if you actually get to go up there and look, it's just been carved for the last 150 years. So, you know, anywhere from, you know, “Janet loves Billy” to, you know, “Joe Schmo” have written their names on that piece of rock, so it might be difficult to find Brennan's name there still.

This is what Founders Park looks like today. Big fish. We have volleyball courts, a great trail system as well as you'll— anytime you're in the mood for a food truck, they're always parked out there.

A little side note, Rapid City had a big flood in 1972, and all of this area was actually a neighborhood. And I'll explain why it's not a neighborhood later on in our presentation. So this is laying out the town on February 5th, they used a surveyor’s chain and a pocket compass to lay out a square mile.

And you can see Rapid Creek going through this way. And the middle town square mile looks kind of strange. It's off-kilter. The rest of the town goes east, west, north, south, but this is about 18 degrees off. Can anybody guess what might have caused that? Well, the trick is, when you use a pocket compass, at any time, magnetic north can be off by true north, and it may have been about that off, but Sam Scott was a mining engineer, so people don't quite believe that was the case.

Others say that they followed Rapid Creek, which makes sense as well. Later on, when the railroad came through, they were really happy and they commented “well, it's glad we don't have to cross the creek a bunch of times to get through town.” So that is a mystery. We also have John Brennan's diary in the museum of those first days setting up the town.

So, Gateway to the Black Hills. This is the, that M Hill that I told you about earlier in Founders Park over here. This is on Main Street, West Main looking east. So this is why we call it the Gateway. You have Hangman's Hill or Skyline Drive over here, M Hill, and if you go that way, it's towards the Hills.

Early nickname of Rapid City as well is called Hay Camp, because the Rapid Valley was extremely fertile. Hay was grown to supply the ox, the mules, horses, and everything like that. And this is where they started business. They did the, uh, I'll get to that in a moment. Here's the original town site, which is just right off of Main Street and Fifth Street, middle of Rapid City.

This cabin is important here. Number 11. It was owned by… let's see here. Number 11. Rufus “Pap” Madison. Pap wasn't that important of a character because he eventually left. His cabin is the oldest remaining structure in Rapid City, built in 1876. It was later moved to a park in Rapid City in 1928, and this is caretaker Mamie McGee with a spinning wheel back in 1928, doing a demonstration. And eventually in that park, it was just used by the parks department as really a storage shed. So in 2012, we had it moved to the Journey, opened it up, and we have refurbished it and redecorated it so that it has its former glory of an old pioneer cabin. So if you get to the Journey, please check that out.

How did supplies get to Rapid City and the Hills? It was all brought from ox freight trains, so male cows or mules and horses as well. Long wagon trains are bringing supplies and immigrants. This is right in that area that we were looking at on the opposite side of an ox freight train.

His name was Evans. Now that's where the name Evans Plunge comes down in Hot Springs. If you go visit Evans Plunge.

This was one of the very few women that took place in freighting. Her name was Emma Knutson. Her son would go along with her. They say that she could whip her bull whip and get a fly off of a horse. But those are just stories. There is also a story about her crossing the Plains and coming across a group of Lakota. She fed them, and in that group was Sitting Bull, and he gave her his earring. The family donated that earring to a museum, but it's since been lost to history. It's not in my museum.

Otherwise, that would definitely be on display. The first year of Rapid City was pretty tough. We had up to 200 people. But right after the Battle of Little Bighorn, where Custer was killed, that was June of 1876. By August, Rapid City was really stressed out because of hostilities between Native Americans and themselves.

They were still on illegal land, but had built out this town to 200 people. There was an attack which left four Rapid Citians dead, and overnight, all but 19 people left. This lasted for about two months until the military came back in and relieved the people to protect them.

In 1877, the United States confiscates the Black Hills from the Lakota people with a… it's called an “agreement,” but it was not quite, like, a true treaty. It was an after-amendment. Not all of the chiefs were present. They were forced into it. There's a lot of it that could be a whole presentation on its own, but there was no way of stopping this gold rush.

So many thousands of people were coming in. In 1980 though, the Supreme Court actually ruled in favor for the Great Sioux Nation, that the land was taken illegally, and the money has not actually ever been accepted by the tribe. It's actually worth over $1 billion today. But, that's where we're at, still.

The first and only hanging in of horse thieves in Rapid City took place on June 20th, 1877, when a group of horse thieves were on the outskirts of town, came across a young boy who's maybe 14, named James “Kid” Hall, and he was walking into town and notices these guys with an extra horse. And they offer him, you know, “if you want a ride, take this one.” Well, someone else in town recognized the horses not belonging to them, and they were apprehended, brought to a small cabin, as the jail at the time. But the— Frank Moulton, the first sheriff of Rapid City, or Pennington County, was not in town at the time.

So, the townspeople were angry, and they formed a posse, brought the group up to Skyline Drive on the way to Dinosaur Park, and hung them on a tree at the top of the hill. No one was ever tried in the hanging. Everyone kept their mouths shut. But even till his last breath, James “Kid” Hall professed his innocence and we will never know if, you know, he was rightfully hanged or not. We still actually, if you drive up that hill, you'll see a big piece of concrete and a wooden stump. That's the actual place of it. We had a historic marker at one time, but the land was purchased, and there's a house right next door to it, which is kind of weird. But now you'll know if you drive up Skyline Drive.

So now we'll just get into a little bit of Rapid City history and some photos going through time. Let's see what we're at here. A really important figure was Alice Gossage in Rapid City's history. Her husband, Joe Gossage, started the Rapid City Journal, which is still our newspaper in Rapid today.

Later in life, she ended up running the journal by herself. She was the editor. Also known as the Mother of Rapid City because of all her good deeds. She passed away in the 1930s, and up on Skyline Drive, which is the big hill with a dinosaur on top of it, if you drive through Rapid again, they erected a monument to her.

And in the 1950s, they needed a place for a TV tower, and that was a prime location. The roads had kind of gone into disrepair. So in 2019, we discovered that they had actually knocked that whole cement memorial off to the side of the hill and built a TV tower in its stead. We've brought that memorial back to the Journey, and now it's near the Pap Madison cabin. We're just now finishing restoring it, redoing a sundial that's on top, so that. Alice Gossage, the Mother of Rapid City, can be remembered and honored.

These are some early shots, which if you've been to Rapid will make more sense, but looking northwest, this is towards that gateway that I'm telling you, I-90 coming through here, and then Mount Rushmore Road to go up to the Hills. Looking west again, in 1883. I just like these because you can kind of see the town grow. Those of you listening won't be able to see that, but come on down to the Journey and we'll show you the pictures.

The railroads arrived in 1886, connecting us to the rest of the country. Other railroads were built throughout the Black Hills for logging operations as well as picnic trains. And there were also a lot of wrecks that were dangerous. The Crouch Line was a famous one, but it had so many turns through the hills, there was constant damage to the track, crashes, and other fatalities.

The open range, 1880 to 1906, which is still important to western South Dakota, our ranching industry. In 1889, the Dawes Act opened 11 million acres of reservation land that wasn't being used by Native Americans to non–Native American settlement, which grew the cattle industry and downtown business.

Now, we have a big stock show every year. It's one of the largest stock shows in the world, at the Monument. Started out with Stockman's Days back in 1894 to 1914. It was the big, main event of the year. Kids would have potato sack races. There would be fake battles, fake train robberies for the cattle barons from Iowa, Chicago, and Sioux City, or Omaha. Now, you guys said you're from Iowa, I keep thinking Iowa. I know Iowa's important.

Rapid City growing to 1885. Got a lot of these pictures. I just want pictures. That Upper Rapid City company started Canyon Lake, which plays an important role in an event later on. But they had set up for the railroad to go through and have a resort called the Lakota, as well as camping, but they weren't successful with investors and it never came to be.

But we do still have Canyon Lake Park in Rapid City. It's a beautiful place. You can go paddle boating, several playground equipment areas, as well as a lot of recreational fishing. Canyon Lake has flooded several times over the years, but rebuilt by the WPA, and you'll see a lot of these old, cool stone structures and lakes. Those were built in the 1930s.

So 1890. 1890 also is the Wounded Knee Massacre, if you've heard of that. This was a result of the military and United States being afraid of something called the Ghost Dance Movement, which was a ceremony by the Lakota to try and bring back their old way of life. They were praying for their old way of life. But it wasn't understood between the military and the Natives there. There was a botched attempt to disarm a Lakota person, and over 250 civilians were killed, including men, women, children, and elders. We actually in the museum have a buffalo coat, buffalo hide coat, that was worn by a soldier that had been killed in the battle, and— er, in the massacre, and is now in the museum collection.

Rapid City's growing up. 1902. There's a few interesting people in Rapid City's history that I always like to touch on. Our first night watchman was a former, um, he was a former miner. He had lost his hands and one eye and his hearing in a mining accident where he was actually trying to warm frozen dynamite over a fire, the dynamite exploded, and he lost his hands, resulting in having two hooks, but he was able to be our first night watchman. This is his rescue dog, Rags. Everybody in town knew them, would visit with Hooky, respected him, but unfortunately he was struck by a car at night in 1926.

A very prominent person in Rapid City's history, they're redoing his house right now, is Valentine McGillycuddy. He was friends with Crazy Horse, uh, an Indian agent. He was part of the Newton-Jenney Expedition, which was a scientific expedition that followed the Custer, to try and confirm gold was in the Black Hills. He was the first white man to climb Black Elk Peak, and his ashes are actually interred into the stone there. So look for that if you get to visit Black Elk Peak. Uh, also president of the School of Mines and mayor of Rapid City.

So the urbanization of Rapid City, it grew to the largest city in western South Dakota. We built the School of Mines and Technology in 1885. Got a library, became county seat in 1878. Many civic groups. This is the fortnightly club above us.

School of Mines is an important place. This is their initial campus, which has grown into that mountainside. They do all types of technology and mining education there, as well as geology. And they're known for their students having high salaries and job rates. So if you got kids, send them to the School of Mines if you want them to get a good job afterwards. Again, that M on the side of the hill, on M Hill, started being painted in 1912 by students.

This is a bridge that no longer exists. There's actually another photo of that bridge breaking and all of the students in the Rapid Creek, which I’ve seen it, but I haven't found it again, and I'd love to add it to this presentation. But every year since 1912, they go up to the top of the hill and repaint the M.

Arts and culture with Grace French. She was a early pioneer artist. We have a large collection of her work in Rapid City, in the Journey Museum, as well as the Bower Family Band. Alice Gossage is actually part of that band, and later, after Disney's success they had with the Sound of Music. They did another film called The One and Only, Genuine Family Band, and I believe Kurt Russell and Dolly Par— who's Kurt Russell's partner? Goldie Hawn. I believe both of them are kids in this movie. But it wasn't very popular, but you'll have to look it up. The One and Only, Genuine Family Band. Based off the Bower Family Band.

This brings us into assimilation and the Rapid City Indian School. These Indian schools were all over the country with the aim of separating children, forbidding them to use their language and practice and beliefs, to destroy the Native American culture. Richard Henry Pratt once described, “kill the Indian to save the man.” If you make them all white, then they can be saved.

Later Sioux Sanatorium, the school was closed and became a sanatorium for tuberculosis patients, and Sioux San Hospital up until just a few years ago, where it was demolished and now is called Oyate Health Center. It's state of the art with a lot of beautiful Native American artwork. They're actually doing a children's walk right across that land to remember the children that passed away at the boarding school. If you visit rememberingthechildren.org, there are a lot of really great and sad stories about the Remembering the Children Project.

So Rapid City being very important economic, commerce hub in the Hills, one of our biggest, more famous stores was the Duhamel Company. Started from Peter Duhamel in the 1880s, coming to the Hills with $70 in his pocket from Montreal, and starting in cattle, then banking, and then saddle making, retail, and eventually broadcasting. This is their float for the Duhamel Ackerman saddles. They were known as the greatest saddles in the world, and we do have a couple on display at the museum now.

Since then, 1985, the Duhamel Company has closed and was one big giant department store is now several small stores. If you get a chance to go down there, right on the corner is Tally’s Silver Spoon, which is a great restaurant. And you'll get to do a presidents walk as well. So visit Rapid City. During their time as the Duhamel Indian and Cowboy Trading Posts through the ‘30s to the 1980s, they accumulated over a thousand Native American artifacts, including hundreds of moccasins, dresses, war clubs, other things like that. But when they closed in 1985, the whole collection was donated to the city of Rapid City, and now it's stored and on exhibit at the Journey Museum. We have a whole area dedicated to the Duhamel Trading Post.

So the gold rush has kind of, you know, by the late 1880s, or by the 1880s about, the gold rush kind of subsided. Other industries included, you know, cattle and ranching, as well as logging, which is even still around today. But the reason why a lot of people visit the Black Hills now is the tourism industry.

What started that out is Peter Norbeck, who became a U.S. Senator and South Dakota Governor, made his first trip out to the Black Hills in 1905 and just fell in love. So went back to Congress to try and get the monument, which is now known as Mount Rushmore, built by artist Gutzon Borglum and his team. You can see the construction of that over there, but the target was to bring people traveling from Chicago or anywhere else to Yellowstone to stop on this trail, stop in the Black Hills and see all the wonderful things we have. It's now the largest industry in the Black Hills.

Another really interesting thing that not a lot of people know is that Space Age started here in the Black Hills. National Geographic and the Army Air Corps at the time were looking for a place which had a natural bowl to launch a balloon to go as high as they could into the atmosphere and do science experiments. They chose the Stratobowl, which is, as you're driving Highway 16 towards Mount Rushmore, it's a little… I was driving here today and I was like, okay, I'm going to remember how to describe this to people. But it's after Old McDonald's farm. You go down the hill and you'll see this turnoff, like other historic sites around the hills, but if you see that, you'll actually be able to drive down into the Stratobowl, which is, I believe, private property now.

But every year they do a big balloon launch. Interesting thing about this was the very first Explorer flight crashed. It may have been because there was a problem with the hydrogen. Hydrogen is flammable, and the pilots had to escape via parachute. A year later, they did another successful mission and made a 72,395 feet record, as well as collected a lot of scientific data.

And this picture's hard to see, but it shows the first photograph ever made showing the curvature of the Earth from the Black Hills.

Dinosaur Park was built during that tourism era boom to bring people to Rapid City. It was a WPA project by artist Emmett Sullivan. They recently redid all of the interpretation and fluffed up the dinosaurs a little bit in Rapid. So if you get to Dinosaur Park, the kids really enjoy going up there.

Rapid City grew again in 1941 because of Ellsworth Air Force Base, best known for the B-1 bomber, and should be growing by another six to eight thousand people as the B-21 is being developed. It'll be held here in Rapid City. Box Elder is just east on the interstate off of I-90.

And one of the biggest events that shaped Rapid City's footprint was the 1972 flood, which happened of torrential rains, record breaking rains overnight, breaking that dam over in Canyon Lake and bringing I think an 11 to 17 foot wall of water through Rapid City. You can see it. This is Rapid City, and this is Rapid Creek, and all of that devastation through the floodplain. It's one of the deadliest floods in US history with 238 fatalities. Now results in all of the greenways. We don't rebuild on that floodplain because of, such an incident actually could happen again, even with everything we've done to curb that. Archeologists have actually seen that we've had floods from thousands of years ago going through the canyons in the Black Hills because they find these deposits of water up in caves up high, high in the hills. The ‘72 flood also resulted in the forming of FEMA.

And this is an interesting picture that I like to show. This is a car lot where the flood waters had raised to float all of the cars up and then landed them back down like dominoes. You can see all of the cars are facing one direction except for this one. Anybody have an idea to why that might be? [The owner's car?] No, that's a good guess! So these are all, you know, different types of sedans, with the engines in the front. So the engines probably weighed more, and the back trunk floating up. Does everybody know where an engine in a VW bug is? It's in the back. So he's flipped the other way.

I love re-photography. I’ve talked a little bit about Paul Horsted, who's done, who did that Hay Camp image earlier. He's actually done, if you see his book in any of the gift shops, Black Hills Yesterday & Today. It's incredible to see what things looked like 150 years ago to today. This is a view from Main Street Square, a great place to bring the family, looking around Rapid City, there's the Elks Theatre on the left side and the Prairie Edge on the right. And today, beautiful Rapid City's a beautiful place. The Journey's a lot of fun. We're the gateway to the Black Hills. Thanks for listening to my presentation. Does anybody have any questions? Please follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

Join Mark Slocum of the Journey Museum and learn about the history of the Black Hills Gold Rush and settling of Rapid City.

Bats of Jewel Cave

Transcript

 Hello and welcome to Jewel Cave National Monument's 125 Years of Discovery Podcast Discovery Hour. Join us this episode as we listen to a presentation on the bats of Jewel Cave. Presented by ACE Education Member Olivia, recorded on May 31st, 2025. A transcript of this episode is available on our website, www.nps.gov/jeca. Thank you for listening.

All righty. Well welcome everyone to Jewel Cave Discovery Hour. Let's see, so today's presentation is going to be about bats. I do want to plug that next month on June 13th at 2:00 PM in this exact location, we will be hearing from the Black Hills Parks and Forest Association about their Field Notes. So make sure to stop on by for that. It should be really exciting. Yeah!

Well, let's get on going into the world of bats. Before we get started, I do want to say my name is Ranger Olivia, or Education Member Olivia, technically. I have been working at Jewel Cave for the past six months as an Education Member helping to set up either school programs or, you know, virtual meetings with groups such as libraries and schools in the area. I've also been helping to lead tours, and I'll be here for another six months of that. So a full year in total. My prior experience has been working as an intern in Colonial Williamsburg, as well as at the Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park in Fredericksburg, Virginia. So a little bit different kind of history, but I really like caves and I love bats. So, it’s right up my alley.

Let's get started with the bats. I do want to point out, first off, that this intro slide has quite a few images of the bats, specifically bats in Jewel Cave. We have a few that are hanging on to the title itself. Those are both Townsend’s big-eared bats. They're most notable for their very large ears.Helps them to hear quite a bit. We'll learn more about them later on.

And then hanging from the top, we have what seems to be a little brown bat, maybe a large brown bat. In the corner, we have one of our northern long-eared bats. And then finally in the lower right corner, we have one of the hoary bats. They're very memorable with their nice white fur. They look like they have frosted tips. The eighties as a bat.

So what are bats? Now, you might have heard of them, but you may not know the specifics, so I do like to go over it a little bit. So the Latin name for bats is “chiroptera”, which translates roughly to “hand wing” because their wings are composed of their hands. So imagine your fingers being really long and spread out, and then in between each finger you have a flap of skin. And using that, they're able to build a wing.

They are part of an order of eutherian mammals, which are mammals that have a placenta. So bats give birth to live young. And then there are over 1,400 species of bats that have been discovered thus far worldwide. Mainland USA and Canada are home to 47 species, and due to being the only mammals that can achieve true flight, they're able to inhabit many ecological niches. They're a very specialized animal. So we have another bat hanging down from the upper left corner of this slide as well. There'll be a lot of bats in this presentation. I’m a big fan. Just, you know, to give an estimation of how many bats there are in regards to the rest of the mammals in the world, bats make up approximately 20 to 21% of all mammals on Earth. And so looking at this nice pie chart I have over to the left, you can see that the largest order of mammals is Rodentia, which are rodents, followed right after by Chiroptera, which are bats. And then that's followed by Soricomorpha, which is kind of an older classification for what you would call, possibly, shrews. And then after that is primates.

So bats make up a huge portion of the animals on Earth, and because of that, they have a lot of importance within our planet. However, quite a few people don't really see them as that vital. So today we're going to talk a little bit about why they matter. So, why should we care about bats? Approximately 70% of all bats worldwide are insectivores. They help to keep bug populations in control so we can enjoy items such as coffee, cacao, rice, corn, citrus, all those nice produce items. In the USA alone, bats save U.S. farmers at least $3.7 billion yearly, with some estimates increasing that to $53 billion yearly. I have heard some estimates for the higher number are in regards to the forest or logging industry. A lot of bugs will lay eggs or larvae that burrow into wood. If bats eat the bugs, we can then use the timber. So it helps to save a lot of wood for use. And then also by eating insects like mosquitoes, bats are helping to reduce the chance of us contracting diseases such as West Nile virus and malaria. They're also helping to reduce diseases. The other 29.998% of bats are nectarivores or frugivores, which help to pollinate and disperse seeds of produce like agave for tequila, as well as bananas, avocados, and mango.

Scientists are also studying bats to see if their ability to tolerate DNA damage, viruses, and parasites could help us to create treatments and/or cures for things like Ebola, malaria, coronavirus, and certain kinds of cancer that can damage DNA. Bats are very good at surviving. The images we have here to the left of the slide, on the top, we have a common big-eared bat that is currently eating a large bug. They eat quite a few variety of bugs. And then on the bottom we have a lesser long-nosed bat who's currently covered in pollen. Likely got a little bit lost in the sauce as it was pollinating a flower. Now we're going to head into Jewel Cave. So we're going to follow this nice ranger on the screen as he heads into the Historic Entrance, which is where the majority of our bats hibernate, or at least roost during the warmer seasons.

So the first bat that I'm going to talk about today is the big brown bat, which in Latin is Eptesicus fuscus

The order that I'm going to present the bats in really has to do from least concern to most concern when it comes to conservation. So the beginning bats are going to be the ones that either we have a lot of within the United States, or ones where populations are relatively stable. And then the ones we'll be ending with are the ones that are the most concern for conservationists right now. I will say though, in general, most bats are at risk, either due to humans, disease, loss of environment. So it is always good to think of all bats as needing some sort of conservation, but this list is going to go from least concern to most concern. For the big brown bat, its Latin name translates roughly to “somber” or “dusky house flyer”. As far as conservation, they are Least Concern, so they're quite abundant. They weigh about one-half to three-fourths of an ounce, or 14 to 21 grams, which is about the weight of a slice of white bread from a packaging. Wingspan is about 13 to 16 inches, so they are quite sizeable as far as our bats go. They're a light brown to more of a medium brown with the dark black muzzle. And as far as prey goes, they're known for eating mostly small beetles, but they're not very picky. And so they will eat a variety of winged insects across a variety of different biomes. You can find them in fields, forests, over water, they're not too picky. And then lifespan, they can live up to 20 years. However, it tends to be much shorter in the wild because they do come into contact with quite a few predators. As far as range, where you can find big brown bats is virtually any habitat across North America from lower Canada to the southern tip of Mexico, but they’re most abundant in deciduous forests and mixed agriculture areas. As far as roosts, they tend to hibernate between early December and March during the coldest parts of the winter, and they'll either roost in the warmer seasons alone if they're males, or in larger colonies of females and pups, up to 300 bats per roosting colony. So quite big groups. The roost can vary from under tree bark and crevices to man-made structures, but the roost has to maintain a stable 32 to 41 degrees Fahrenheit, so they are quite picky about temperature. Due to their larger size, these bats don't have to worry too much about cold temperatures. They're able to stay active for longer than other bat species during the colder months, so that helps them to have a little bit more of an ecological niche when it comes to hunting. And then, fun fact, big brown bats can fly up to 40 miles per hour. They're quite speedy.

The next bat we're going to talk about is the long-legged bat, which is Myotis volans. Name translation is roughly “mouse-eared flyer.” It is Least Concern. Weight is about five to 10 grams or two to four pennies, so very small. Wingspan is about 10 to 12 inches. Color: they're brown with notably dense fur underneath the wing membrane, which connects the elbows to the knees. So if you can think of your arm spread out, it's connecting those two.

And their prey is mostly moths and flying insects that are often flying over water and vegetation that are bridging dry to wet land. So kind of an in-between area. And lifespan is up to 21 years in the wild. So bats can live for quite a long time depending on if they're able to, you know, survive predators. I do also want to note that each of these slides I go through for the bat species, to the right of the slide is an image of the bat itself. So I am showing visuals as we're going along with the information. And then as far as the slides with the maps, I am showing a visual of the map to the left, with the information to the right, so it’s just kind of flipped, but it also has an image. So the range for this bat species is mostly mountainous Western North America from south of Canada down into California, and along the Sierra Madre Occidental in Mexico.

As far as roosting, they like to hibernate in caves during the winter and they can roost within buildings cliff crevices and in hundred-plus year old trees underneath the bark. They're most commonly found on the edges of coniferous and pinyon-juniper woodlands, or with enlarged clearings at elevations around 4,000 to 9,000 feet, in order to receive the maximum amount of sunlight per day, so they're very into sunning.

Fun fact, the long-legged bat is also known for its notable keel, which is a flap of skin on its calcar, which is a spur of cartilage that causes the wing to stretch along, and so it stretches along the side of the foot rather than directly to the ankle. So it kind of goes off a little bit. According to studies as to why these calcars or keels are developed, it has to do more so with allowing for larger wingspan or potentially increased lift when they're flying, so it can help them with going farther for longer distances. Next bat is the eastern red bat, Lasiurus borealis. I don't know why the other parentheses disappeared. Alright. Name translation is the “shaggy-tailed northern bat”. So these bats are Least Concern conservation wise, but more concern for eastern colonies. They worry about 0.4 to 0.5 ounces, or around 11 to 15 grams, which is around four to six pennies. The wingspan is 11 to 13 inches. The males tend to be much brighter red, while the females appear more frosted or gray. And the prey is moths, crickets, beetles, and cicadas. So a lot of flying insects. That's kind of a common theme for a lot of our bats. Lifespan can be up to 12 years, so a little bit shorter than the other ones. As far as where you can find eastern red bats, they mostly live east of the Rocky Mountains from Canada and down south into central Florida, making them America's most abundant tree bat. They're very all over the country. Due to their coloration, this species is well-suited for tree dwelling. They'll actually use the reddish complexion to blend into pine cones and dead leaves, and they're also solitary so they can be commonly found roosting alone in south-facing trees.

During the winter, most of these eastern red bats migrate to warmer locations along the Atlantic seaboard, like birds. So it used to be described, you could see giant groups of bats, almost like birds in the sky as they migrated. However, nowadays, we have quite a few less of the eastern red bats, and so we don't really see those huge migration groups anymore. But there are records of them existing. For those in the more northern areas, they may experience periods of torpor, and they utilize their fur in order to survive the cold. So they don't necessarily hibernate like the other species, but they do go into periods where they have lower energy levels in order to conserve their fat and their water.

Fun fact, female eastern red bats typically have two to three young, but they can care for as many as five at a time, and that makes their litters uncharacteristically large compared to other bat species, which tend to only have about one pup per season, and the females have four mammary glands in order to support all of their pups. They are also known for sometimes leaving their pups while they go hunt for food, and they can also move them if need be. I imagine five pups would be kind of hard to fly with. They're a very cool bat.

Now we have the Hoary bat, Lasiurus cinereus, which roughly translates to “shaggy-tailed ashen bat.” As you can see from the coloration, it has these nice frosted tips. It does kind of look like the bat was dipped into ashes.

Conservation status is Least Concern on the mainland, but the Hawaiian subspecies, L. c. semotus, is endangered, and colonies on the East Coast are in need of conservation, so this one is a little bit more spread out as far as location. They weigh about 0.7 to 1.2 ounces, or 19 to 35 grams, about four to seven nickels. Wingspan is 13 to 16 inches. This species has unique banding on its colors, going from kind of a darker black-brown underneath, and then as you go up to the top of the bat, it has more of a white frosting at the tips and yellowish fur around the face. Their prey is larger insects because they do need to eat quite a bit more, so they hunt moths, true bugs, mosquitoes, and crickets. And then lifespan, it can vary from two to 12 years, depending on location and predation. So these bats don't live as long as the other species in comparison. That could largely be because of their range, and also the amount of predators they come in contact with. They are America's most widespread bat, ranging from southeastern Canada to Hawaii, and they go all the way down into South America, a little bit into Brazil, and then down, kind of into Peru, a little bit more down that way. They are a solitary species and they prefer to roost in tree foliage around 10 to 15 feet above the ground. When they're roosting — Howdy folks! [Hello.] We're talking about some bats if you'd like to learn about bats. [Yeah, excellent. Thank you!] No problem. So right now we are talking about the hoary bat. So, I'm going through all the bat species of Jewel Cave National Monument. Feel free to come right on in. I will say, for reference, this is what the hoary bat looks like. Howdy folks. [Hi.] Welcome right on in. Hi! Welcome right on in.

So I'm doing a presentation on bats for this month's Discovery Hour, and so I'm going through each species of bat you can discover at Jewel Cave. We have 10 total, and right now we're on the hoary bat, which is known as the most widespread bat species within the Americas. And so you can find them all the way from within Canada down into southeastern Canada, down into Hawaii, as well as down into South America. So they are all across the Americas.

And they are a solitary species. They prefer to roost in trees and foliage around 10 to 15 feet above the ground. When they're roosting, they use their tails to wrap around themselves to kind of form a little cocoon or a blanket. And they hang by one foot, which can help them to blend in with the leaves around them, so they kind of rustle with the wind a little bit. Instead of hibernating, they are also migratory, so they fly south to warmer climates when avoiding the cold. Fun fact, during migration, hoary bats have been recorded as flying as fast as 13 miles an hour and up to 8,000 feet. They are very fun. All righty.

Now, we have the western small-footed bat, which is Myotis ciliolabrum. So the name translation is roughly the “mouse-eared whiskered-lip bat”. So conservation status, they're considered a species of concern depending on the region where you're at. They weigh about 0.17 to 0.25 ounces or around five to seven grams, about two to three pennies. Wingspan can be eight to around 10 inches. And the color is usually a yellow or a buff, which is kind of a tone of yellow, it's a bit more beige. And subspecies can also be white, and they have a black face mask, which helps to tell them apart from the California myotis. They're very similar in appearance. And then as far as prey, most western small-footed bats consume a variety of flying insects, specifically moths, true bugs, caddisflies. But where there is competition for food from other bat species, they can specialize in either hunting beetles or moths specifically. They're very good at adapting.

And then their range is quite small. So western and southwest Canada down into the USA is where you can find the species, and due to relying on flying insects for food, they tend to live near bodies of water and forage within less than a mile from where they are roosting, so very small area. And for roosting, they prefer rocky outcroppings and cliff faces, typically roosting alone or in groups no larger than 19, so they're relatively solitary. And for hibernation, they prefer cracks and crevices and caves, with no more than six bats per hibernating location. So they don't want to be in a big group for hibernating. Fun fact, in some, but not all western small-footed bats, their tail will actually protrude past their uropatagium, which is the flap of skin that connects the end of the ankle down to their tail. So they can have a little bit longer tails, which also helps to tell them apart from their, I guess, lookalike species, the California myotis. Alright. We are halfway through the bats. So like this bat on the rock, hold on. We're almost there. So that is actually a photo taken from within Jewel Cave. A little bat hanging on the top of the rock. As far as species go, that is probably one of the brown bats. It's not a Townsend’s, its ears are quite small. I'd go probably little brown bat or big brown bat. It's just hanging out.

Alright! Now we go little brown bat, which is Myotis lucifugus. Sorry for my Latin, I guess. Yeah, it's not great. Name translation for this bat is roughly “mouse-eared light-fleeing,” which is aptly named. They don't like the light. Conservation status: they're stable, but subject to review, and current population is declining in the Northeast, and so this is one of the species where if you look on the government website, they are currently resubmitting it to see if they can get them at a higher status.

The weights, they weigh about 0.2 to 0.5 ounces or five to 14 grams, so less than six pennies. Wingspan eight to nine inches. Color is more of a cinnamon or a dark brown with a gray fur underneath, and they're not known for being picky with their prey. They consume a wide variety of flying insects. And you know, it can vary a little bit depending on if they're in regions with less flying insects. They are also known to eat arachnids, so a lot of fun bugs. Lifespan, they average about six and a half years, but they can live for up to 30 years. The range is across North America, from Alaska, down all the way to Newfoundland, and then down a little bit more towards Mexico, but not many within Mexico. And then for roosting, which is just a fun term for bats hanging out during the warmer season when they're not hibernating, they like to roost within caves and man-made or cave-like structures, and they tend to hibernate from late fall to the beginning or early parts of spring and summer. And during the summer, the females tend to stay within larger colonies. So they'll be in attics and bat boxes with up to a hundred bats per area, while the males tend to roost underneath dead and live tree bark. So they'll find little holes and they'll crawl in there, make a little home for themselves. And then fun fact, the oldest known little brown bat was first banded in 1975, and then was rediscovered in Alberta, Canada around 2009, so it was at least 35 years old. The bats can live for quite a while depending on if they are able to survive.

Now we have the silver-haired bat, which is Lasionycteris noctivagans. Name translation: about “night-wandering hairy bat.” Conservation status: it is common across the USA, but somewhat rare in portions of their South Dakota habitat. So according to the state of South Dakota, these ones are in need of conservation. They weigh about one-fourth to three-eighths of an ounce, or eight to 11 grams, so not too much. Wingspan, again, 11 to 13 inches.

Their fur is much darker and it can be tipped with silver or white. The one in this photo right here is pretty much just solid black, but under certain light conditions it can be a little bit different. And then this species feeds are mainly small, soft-bodied insects such as mosquitoes, midges, and moths. And they like to hunt on the side of roadways, so you might be able to see them as you're driving. They can live for up to 12 years. And then their range is from southern Alaska to Newfoundland and as far south as Northern Mexico. So all across the United States. The maternity colonies rely upon tree hollows and cavities in order to have their little roof set up, and they need old growth trees. So about a hundred-plus years old. Like other tree-dwelling bats, they will switch roosts throughout the roosting season. And so you'll see them in one bat and they might just abandon that one and move to another. They might move back. It just depends on what they're looking for. They can be found hibernating within a wide variety of locations, such as under bark in tree hollows, within woodpecker holes, birds’ nests. You can sometimes find them in garages and outbuildings. So this is one of the bats that are more common to be found in man-made structures. Just because they're looking for a nice, safe, warm place in order to spend their hibernation. And while they are formerly known as a very leisurely flyer, recent studies have found that they can fly as fast as 28 miles per hour. So, you know, it might have just been the bats they were studying back then that weren't too keen on flying fast.

Alright, now we're getting into one of the specialty bats for the area. So this is the Black Hills fringe-tailed bat, or Myotis thysanodes pahasapensis. Which roughly translates to the “mouse-eared Black Hills fringed bat.” Yeah, it's a little photo with all of its teeth. Very cute. Conservation status, they are Vulnerable for the subspecies, but the fringed myotis in general for the United States is mostly of Least Concern. So not too bad. They weigh about one-eighth to three-eighths of an ounce, or one to two nickels, just about, and their wingspan can be 10.5 to 12 inches, so not too big. They can be a dark brown to gray with short, wire-like hairs that come off of the uropatagium, which is the skin that connects the legs to the tail. And then for prey, they mostly live in the mountainous regions and so they need access to diverse vegetation and water sources. And so they hunt flying insects such as moths and flies that rely on said water. So for the Black Hills fringe-tailed myotis, they can be found mostly within just Nebraska, South Dakota, and a little bit of Wyoming. For fringed bats in general, they are all across the United States, but we're focusing on the subspecies. And this species tends to roost under bridges and buildings and within caves and mines from April to September, they're the most active, and then hibernation typically occurs from September to April. This subspecies was first described in 1967, so they're a relatively new species of bat. So you can just see them all over. Not too many sightings.

Now we're getting into one of Jewel Cave's most, I guess, picturesque bats. This is the Townsend’s big-eared bat, or Corynorhinus townsendii. Name translation is roughly “Townsend's helmet-nosed bat,” and it is named after John Kirk Townsend, who has a lot of species named after him. Conservation status: they’re widespread across South Dakota, but they are considered rare in portions of what used to be really large colonies, and so they are cause for concern. They weigh about 0.3 to 0.5 ounces. Wingspan: around 12 to 13 inches. So again, not too big. They can be reddish-gray with brown fur and their ears are an average of 38 millimeters long. So quite big. They use them in order to direct their echolocation sounds in order to pinpoint where their flying prey is. And then they have a little part in the middle of their ear that's called the tragus. The tragus helps to define those sounds even better. So you can put it in, basically imagine a satellite dish and then you have a piece within the dish to help direct it. So that's what their ears are functioning as. They like to eat flying insects such as beetles and mosquitoes.

And then lifespan on average is about 16 years, but they've been known to live up to 30. So their range is all across kind of the western United States from Central British Columbia down into Central Mexico, as far south as Texas, Oklahoma. And then there are a few populations that are scattered across either the Midwest or the Eastern Coast. They are known to prefer hibernating in caves and crevices with substantial air flow. So Jewel Cave is a really good place for them. We have a constant airflow within the cave.

And they do not tend to migrate far away, which makes the Jewel Cave colony even more special. Because so far, we've only really located one of the maternity roosts, and so surely there must be more than one because we have a lot of the Townsend’s bats, but we just don't know where they're coming from. So that is something we're trying to solve within Jewel Cave National Monument. And they like to roost on cliffs, caves, and rock edges. So if you're climbing around in the Black Hills, you might see them on the rocks.

And they have fantastic control of their ear muscles. The Townsend’s bats can roll up their ears kind of, so they look like a rams horn if they need to conserve heat while it's hibernating or sleeping. And then they can also extend or pull back their ears when they're flying. When pulled back, the ears are almost half of their body length. So really long ears.

And because we have so many Townsends’ within Jewel Cave National Monument, we have a lot of photos of them. So right here to the left, we have an image of a Townsend’s bat hibernating, and you can see its ear has kind of curled up on itself. So it's conserving heat that way, kind of like a blanket of sorts.

And then to the right, we have a little group of the Townsends’ that are just roosting up on the cave ceiling, potentially hibernating. They're just hanging out up there. When our Jewel Cave bat surveyors go into the cave, they will take a yearly count and so they'll find colonies like this or little roosting groups and they'll count each individual bat so we can get the estimates for the year. And then finally, the last piece I'm going to talk about is the northern myotis, or Myotis septentrionalis. Latin terms are fun. Translation: “northern mouse-eared bat”. Hi, welcome on in! So conservation status, these bats are federally Endangered. In fact, they're the only endangered species listed for South Dakota, specifically for a bat. They weigh about 4.9 to 6.4 grams, or two to three pennies. Wingspan: about 8.9 to 10.2 inches. Color: medium to dark brown, and on the top, more of a tawny brown. But on kind of, their underside, they're a little bit lighter. Prey is mostly leafhoppers, moths, beetles, and arachnids. So also spiders. They are over 37 U.S. states and eight Canadian provinces, so they are quite widespread. And for hibernation, they prefer mines and caves with almost no airflow and very high humidity. Because of that, there are very few places where these bats can successfully hibernate. You can mostly find them squeezed into little crevices and cracks, almost so that the only thing showing is their ears and their head. They're very squished in there.

During the warmer months, they can be found roosting on barns, sheds, underneath the bark of trees. They're fairly flexible when it comes to picking trees where they're going to roost, so that isn't a huge issue for this species. However, they exclusively hibernate in caves and mines. For that reason, whenever they have a mine that, you know, starts going active, either for production of ores or mining, something like that, or if you have people wandering into mines or caves where they aren't supposed to be, they can disturb the bats and in turn lead to a decrease in the population. So these bats are very susceptible to humans. Now I'm going to get into a few of the threats to bats. So the biggest threat we're currently dealing with in the United States is white-nose syndrome. It was first identified in the U.S. around the year 2006, and the fungus has since killed over 6 million bats nationwide. And it results in the decimation of certain bat populations that used to be fairly stable, such as the northern long-eared bat that we talked about, as well as the Indiana bat, which is a very specialized species.

And the fungus spreads along the bats’ skin, so it goes onto the wings as well as the face. It causes itching and destruction to the wing itself. Irritation will rouse them from hibernation, they'll start to scratch, and as they keep waking up, they're losing more and more of that precious fat that they've been trying to reserve for hibernation. And so as they lose more energy, they don't have enough to survive. And there is no food outside. It's still the dead of winter. The bat will eventually starve to death.

So there is a bat that is currently infected with white-nose syndrome. Unfortunately, once a bat is infected, it is almost surely going to die. There's not really a way to help them at that point. I did pull up some of the numbers for Jewel Cave National Monument specifically, just 'cause I think it's kind of interesting. So pre-1959, the way that they counted bats is a little bit different, but we had around 3,500 bats to 4,000 bats. And then from 1959 to 2016, approximately an average of 1,200 bats to 1,500 bats were hibernating here per year. I do have the numbers specifically for the years 2000 to 2002 because in the year 2000 in August, we had the Jasper Wildfire. It was a fire that burned about 90% of the land within our park site. And so, you know, looking at the numbers, the fire really didn't affect the bat counts. So we went from 1,143 bats, and then we bounced up to 1,168. So the fire was not a huge deal for them. 2018 were the first records of white-nose syndrome within Jewel Cave National Monument. We didn't have any bat counts from 2018 to 2022. Just, you know, due to a lot of things happening outside of the cave. And then from 2022 to 2023, we start to see a steep decline in our bat population. So we went from, you know, around 1,500 bats, maybe, per year. Now we're at 570. 2023 to 2024, a little bit over 600. And then this year's most recent bat count, we've only had 481. It can't be confirmed that white-nose is the direct cause of the steep decline. However, when you look at the numbers, it is definitely one of the playing factors. We've had a 58 to 68% decrease in Jewel Cave’s bat population since 2018. So is white-nose the cause for all of this? Probably not, but it is certainly one of the contributing factors. There's a little bat hanging onto the side of the graphic. Very cute. We also have a few other issues that can affect bats, such as invasive predators. So bats are food sources for animals like snakes, owls, and hawks. But invasive predators, like domestic and feral cats, such as this nice little ranger cat I have photo of to the right, they are known to kill and eat an inproportionate amount of bats, and so they can lead to the decimation of certain populations. No problem! Yeah! Have a good one! Let's see.

Another way that bats can be disturbed or harmed is if you disturb them while they are roosting or hibernating. So while bats are roosting, they tend to be caring for their pups, especially in the earlier part of the season. And if the mothers are frightened off, they will abandon the pups. And if the pups can't find a mother, they will starve to death. And then for hibernation, the bat will enter a period of lower metabolic rate in order to preserve their fat and water for the hibernation period. And if you disturb them, they might wake up and hence use up their fat reserves, and it can lead to starvation. There is no food available for them at that time of the year.

A few other effects. Of course, destruction of the environment is a big one. A number of bat species rely on access to old-growth forests, caves, and mines in order to hibernate and/or roost. And as more of their habitat is encroached upon, they lose more and more of those resources, so it can lead to the destruction of certain bat species.

And then consuming water and food sources with pesticides can lead to buildup of chemicals within the bats’ fat or organs, and it can lead to conditions like cell death or apoptosis, liver disease, and damage to their echolocation abilities. And then of course, fear and misunderstanding is a big one. So only 0.002% of all bats on Earth consume blood. However, you know, vampires are something that are very popular in social media, which stems all the way back to the 1720s with the vampire craze. And so a lot of bats are seen as bad omens, despite the fact that most bats eat insects, fruits, or, you know, just bugs hanging out. And then of course, although bats are the leading cause of rabies, I guess, exposure within the United States, only about 1% of bats in nature have rabies. That is, of course, not to say, you know, “oh, all bats are safe. Definitely touch them.” No, make sure you know, if you wake up and there's a bat in your room, or you come in contact with a bat and it either hits you, bites you, or scratches you, you need to go to the doctor immediately. Rabies is one of the deadliest diseases. But that being said, very few bats actually have rabies. So, you know, it's always something you need to be wary about, but at the same time, bats are not the primary issue for that. And then over here to the left, we have an image of the hairy-legged vampire bat. So it doesn't look too scary all things considered, but it is a consumer of blood. And then, good question: How can I help? So a good way to help, of course, would be to set up any deterrence for bats, either before their roosting season or hibernation season or after they leave. So you don't want to disturb them during the time while they're either hibernating or roosting, but before and after should be good. Of course, educating others on the importance of bats is always great to help reduce the stigma around their species. A lot of bats are very great for the world. However, people don't like bats in general, seems to be. You can plant a garden or native plant in order to attract insects, which help to provide more food sources for bats, help to kind of create a little chain reaction. You can build a bat box, which helps to provide bats with a safe place to roost. So they are deterred from using manmade structures such as outbuildings and garages. It helps keep the bats safe, as well as provides them a place to live. And finally, if you find a sick and/or injured bat, make sure to contact either your local wildlife rehabilitator or bat rescuer who can best help to either, you know, move and relocate the bat or provide it treatment if it is ill. If that's not an option, you can also call, you know, your specialized bat removal companies or your animal and pest control units. Again, never handle a bat if you find one. Just leave it be and call someone who can. Alright. If any of you guys are going to go onto the tour within Jewel Cave, you may just come in contact with bats, and hopefully using today's information, you now know how to safely interact with them and why they are important to keep within our Monument. But this image right here, we have a group of people on the Historic Lantern Tour as they're walking past, and there are a few bats just flying right above them. No one's getting injured or harmed. It's rather just coexistence, because the bats were here first, and now we're just trying to help them out if we can. I finally have a list of all of the bat species we talked about today But since it’s a long list, I'm just going to leave it as this. Awesome! Thank you so much for coming! Any questions? [So bats are really good at surviving diseases. To the point that we're using them to research treatments. Why are they so susceptible to white-nose syndrome?]

I think it has to do with the disease type. And so bats are really good at surviving parasites, certain infections, and then if their DNA gets damaged, it tends to be okay-ish in the long run. However, white-nose syndrome, it just causes such a severe loss of fat reserves during a period where the bat can't really help but depend on those. And so it creates, I guess, there's not really anything that that can do other than either just try to survive or eventually die. So the body can't just grow fat out of nowhere is a big issue. Any other questions?

Join Ranger Olivia and learn about the bats of Jewel Cave.

History of the National Park Service

Transcript

Hello and welcome to Jewel Cave National Monument’s 125 years of discovery podcast Discovery Hour. Join us this episode as we listen to a presentation on the history of the National Park Service presented by Ranger Kierstan recorded on April 19th, 2025. A transcript of this episode is available on our website www.nps.gov/jeca. Thank you for listening.

So, my name is Kierstan, I'm going to be talking with you today about the history of the National Park Service and there is a lot of history with the National Park Service. Like I said I'm going to try my hardest not to bore anyone with this. But before we go into the history of the Park Service, I want to start with what we are now, what we are today, and we can do that—we can sum it up really easily—by looking at the National Park Service mission, and I'm going to read it for you.

The National Park Service preserves unimpaired the natural and cultural resources and values of the National Park System for the enjoyment, education, and inspiration of this and future generations. The National Park Service cooperates with partners to extend the benefits of natural and cultural resource conservation and outdoor recreation throughout the country and the world.

Now that's a lot of words, I'll admit that, so I underlined a couple of the ones that I felt were pretty important. A big one is “preserves unimpaired,” and that's what we do here at Jewel Cave and throughout the National Park Service. We want to protect the resources that we were designated or proclaimed to protect. And so we want to preserve it unimpaired, make sure that the future generations—so our junior rangers, their junior rangers, and on and on—are all going to be able to explore and experience these same places.

Welcome! Come on in, yeah. And then this last line that I underlined: “cooperates with partners.” We have that because recently, within the last 20 years, we actually updated our mission because a big part of what we do is we work with outside entities. Right here at Jewel Cave we work with the Black Hills Parks and Forests Association, a partner. Yeah, come on in, join us, join us. Yeah, and so cooperating with partners, working with partners, is a really big part of how we complete our mission. So welcome to all of our newcomers. We are talking about the history of the National Park Service but starting at the current day with the current mission of the National Park Service—protecting the resources, the natural and cultural resources of this place.

So now we talked a little bit about the current day, let's go back to the beginning. Back to this place called Yellowstone. Anybody heard of Yellowstone? Yeah, almost everyone's heard of Yellowstone before—if not, now you have. And Yellowstone is a big, beautiful, grand place known for hot springs, thermal areas, beautiful scenic panoramic views. But for a long time it was just there, it was just a beautiful space that some people knew about but most people didn't until 1872.

And that's when Congress passed the Yellowstone Park Protection Act. And that was actually in March of 1872, and it was passed to reserve and withdraw from settlement, occupancy, or sale under the laws of the United States, and dedicated and set apart as a public park or pleasuring ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people. So pretty much Yellowstone was really cool, really beautiful, and we wanted to protect it, to make it so that all of you could eventually go and see Yellowstone in the way they saw it in the 1800s.

Yellowstone is huge for a lot of reasons. One of the big reasons though is it was the first National Park ever created in the United States. Not only that, it was the first National Park created in the entire world, as far as we know, so that was pretty exciting. Now, if you’re from, say, Arkansas you might think, “No, no, no, Hot Springs was protected first.” Yes, Hot Springs National Park, as it's now known, was protected before Yellowstone, but as a national reservation. It’s all about the semantics, all about the wording. And then if you're from California you might think Yosemite. Yes, most people have again, you might think they were a park first. Once again, yes, they were, but they were a State Park. They didn't become a National Park until 1890, so a few years after Yellowstone. So, Yellowstone was still the first National Park—national, that's the key there

And once it became a National Park, woohoo, now what? So, they hired some staff, and by “some” I mean one. They hired a Park Superintendent—one Park Superintendent to manage the entire Yellowstone National Park, which is huge. It spans over three different states and is a huge place. And that first Superintendent did not get paid and had no funding and no laws to help support him, so he did the best he could.

According to literature about the Superintendent, he entered the park at least twice in a five-year span. Yeah, could you imagine working somewhere and only going twice in five years? That might sound like a dream job for some folks, but it does make it very difficult to protect a resource if you're not actually there. So, it was a little bit of a challenge, because initially the plan for this first National Park was going to be at no expense to the government, which is why there was no funding and no salary for our Superintendent.

After five years of realizing, “That's not going to work,” Congress eventually appropriated some funding for this new National Park, Yellowstone National Park, and the appropriations were authorized to protect, preserve, and improve the park. Yes, one of the first things they did, they hired someone else, they hired another person called the first gamekeeper. Essentially, they were the first park ranger, and they also used that funding to build headquarters and build a primitive road system as well, essentially starting to build some infrastructure so the Superintendent and that gamekeeper could go into the park more than twice in five years.

Make it a little bit easier. Also remember our mission is to preserve unimpaired for the enjoyment of us and future generations. It's hard to enjoy it if you can't get to it, so that's why we started to make it a little easier to get into. But still now we had two staff, a way to get into the park, but Yellowstone was still huge. And still no laws to help protect the cave, or not the cave, we’re at the cave, the park. And so eventually the secretary of the interior who was in charge of managing Yellowstone, at least overall at the Washington DC level, eventually realized this is not working very well. So they went to the secretary of war and said, help. Can you help us? We don't have the ability, we don't have the funds, we don't have the manpower in order to protect this place, this beautiful place.

So the secretary of war said, OK. And Company M, which was a part of the United States Cavalry at the time, they arrived at the park in August of 1886. So they took over, and they started patrolling in the park so they could make sure there wasn’t any vandalism or poaching or anything like that going on. They would also guard major attractions like Old Faithful—ooh, wrong direction, there we go, Old Faithful right there. Yellowstone started getting protected, and the Cavalry would then protect places like Old Faithful because, if you know anything about Yellowstone, you know it's probably not a good idea to go and touch the super-hot water, and so the Cavalry was there to help make sure that didn't happen.

So they protected Yellowstone, but that's just one park. Now we have over 400, so how did the rest get here? Well, that came about because after that Yellowstone Protection Act, people started to realize that there were a lot of natural, beautiful places that needed to be protected. And so as folks went to travel, went to all these new places, and were maybe traveling to Yellowstone, they started to realize there's a lot of archaeological and historic things out there that they could see. So it started to generate more and more interest in the artifacts—the antiquities, as they were called—in the rest of the country.

Now, as people were traveling, and just like us when we walk through a forest, you might damage something not on purpose, but accidentally it could happen. So there was a lot of concern about damaging any of those antiquities, losing the information or the history that we might have there.

And so word eventually spread to Washington DC about this concern—all the way to this man right here, President Theodore Roosevelt. And eventually, President Roosevelt heard about the concern for protecting the antiquities, the artifacts, the history in the United States. So he signed the Antiquities Act of 1906, and this act gave the president power to create a National Monument. So places like Devils Tower and Jewel Cave, surprisingly enough, were able to be protected for the cultural and scientific significance of that resource. Now there is a little bit of a caveat with the Antiquities Act—it does have to already be on federally owned land. So here at Jewel Cave we were already part of the National Forest, but no one really knew about the cave yet. Once the cave was discovered, even though we were still part of the National Forest, that’s why we were able to become a National Monument.

And President Roosevelt, not only did he sign the Antiquities Act, thanks to him during his time as president he helped establish over 230 million acres of public land, which was amazing. Especially here at Jewel Cave, we really like him—he protected us. But that boils down to about 150 national forests, 51 federal bird reserves, 4 national game preserves, 5 national parks, and 18 national monuments, including us. We were actually the 13th National Monument that he created. He did a lot of really great work for us. So now we've got Yellowstone, we've got all these national monuments, bird reserves, national forests, all this public land getting protected, yay. But it was protected by the secretary of the interior, the secretary of war, and National Forest. It was protected by a bunch of different agencies—great. But they all had their own way of doing things, which works out until you realize that they kind of needed to work together.

And by August of 1916 there were 14 national parks, 21 national monuments, and 2 national reservations, like that one in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and at Casa Grande Ruins. So by August of 1916 there was a lot of public land—that doesn’t even count the bird reserves, the national forests, anything like that. So clearly there needed to be something to keep all of these guys together and keep it all organized and help have a more cohesive plan for how we're going to protect all these national parks and all these public lands. And so folks, early promoters like influential journalists, even railroad companies who knew if we could promote tourism to these national parks the railroads could make money, they also were promoting this plan to come up with a cohesive agency that can protect all these public lands.

And that's how we got to the National Park Service in 1916—the Organic Act. This is when we came into play, the National Park Service. And so the Organic Act said: Be it enacted by the Senate and the House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, that there is hereby created in the Department of the Interior a service to be called the National Park Service. That's us. Now we're here, we're ready. But one thing too—we’re going to have the National Park Service, now we have to actually do it, right? And so this act established the National Park Service.

And then we had to go back to those early promoters, one of which is Stephen T. Mather. He was an early promoter of the National Park Service, a friend of the secretary of the interior, and really said we need to protect these national parks, we need to create this National Park Service. So the secretary of the interior in 1917 said, OK, go for it, you do it. And Stephen Mather became the first director of the National Park Service, and he helped create the base of the fundamental mission, philosophy, and policies of the National Park Service moving forward.

Stephen Mather, like I said, created that base, created that foundation, and now still some of his policies, some of his ideas, are still looked back to even now to guide our mission and our ideas for the National Park Service.

And now that we have the National Park Service we kind of had to figure out: how do we want to manage this, how do we want to continue moving forward? And one of the big ideas is that the Park Service was directed to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wildlife therein, and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.

So at the very beginning I showed you our current mission. We even preserve unimpaired — we've been doing that since 1916. And for future generations, again, that's been our plan since 1916 and even earlier, but definitely since 1916.

So our goal is to make sure as many people as possible can explore these beautiful public lands in whatever way they desire. Every opportunity should be afforded the public wherever possible to enjoy the national parks in the manner that best satisfies the individual taste.

I love that wording, “the individual taste.” So for me, I am not going to climb like Mount Baldy or anything. I'm not going to climb a mountain, that's not how I enjoy the national parks. You might. You might want to go rock climbing, you might want to go whitewater rafting, you might want to just do a nice little canoe trip down the river, you might want to do a little hike — but that's the beauty of the national parks. From the very beginning we've been wanting to make sure that anyone could find a way to recreate in these national parks in some form and enjoy their time here.

Not only that, we also wanted to make sure you could learn about these parks. So even before the National Park Service began, interpretive efforts like what I'm doing right now — I'm an interpretive park ranger — so education was underway in minor areas and in different parks. But once the National Park Service began really focusing on finding that enjoyment and experience, the parks more and more interpretive programs started to take place. Natural History Museums started to pop up in parks, full-scale programming like guided hikes, interpretive talks, guided boat trips like what we see in the picture here — all of that started to take place more and more.

In 1920 the very first park naturalist was hired in Yellowstone. So it was pretty exciting that more and more education was becoming more common. Now as people started to learn more about the parks and started to go and experience their public lands a lot more, more and more parks started to get created.

And then in 1933 the National Park Service had another big change. It's called the Reorganization of 1933. So remember I said some became national monuments through the Antiquities Act. When that act was first signed, once a national monument was created, whatever agency already owned the land now got to manage the national monument. So some national monuments were managed by the Forest Service and the Department of War, for the most part.

Department of War national monuments maybe aren't their forte — you're not usually going to be involved with national monuments or protecting public land. So in 1933 President Franklin Roosevelt — we really like the Roosevelts here — President Franklin Roosevelt transferred monuments and parks from the Department of War and the National Forest to the National Park Service. That reorganization transferred not only all those national monuments that had already been created, but all that were going to be created afterwards would get transferred to the National Park Service. It greatly increased the size of the National Park Service and now we had a whole lot more to manage, which is great.

And not only that — Washington, D.C. Have any of you ever heard of the National Mall in Washington, D.C. or the Lincoln Memorial? Yeah? You’ve ever been there? Awesome. It's run by the National Park Service, but until 1933 it had its own separate agency that was managing it. And then in 1933 it became part of the National Park Service.

Now we have all these parks, all these monuments, they're all part of the National Park Service — yay! And then we started getting more and more visitors, which is really exciting. More and more folks started to come to the National Park Service and to all the public lands that we were protecting.

In the early 1950s visitation continued to rise. We started to get a lot more visitors to all of these different parks, even here at Jewel Cave we started to get more and more visitors, which is great. But we still didn't really have everything figured out. Everyone's always trying to learn more, right? We were still then too. We started to notice that the conditions in the parks, like the buildings and the trails, were starting to decline because there wasn't a set infrastructure just yet. So Park Service staff realized we need to fix this. And for the 50th anniversary, which is in 1966, they decided to come up with a plan — a very ambitious plan, I will say that for sure — and they called it Mission 66. It's a 10-year plan, so the goal was to start it in 1956. They had 10 years so by the 50th anniversary of the National Park Service we were going to be done and we were going to have a beautiful National Park Service.

And it was initiated in 1956, like I said, to upgrade the facilities, staffing, and even the management of the entire National Park Service all throughout the country. And it worked. Congress ended up appropriating over a billion dollars over that 10-year span to upgrade our parks — go us!

We benefited from that here at Jewel Cave. Our visitor center started getting built right at the tail end of Mission 66, but we did get some of that benefit. Now, one of the things that they started doing in Mission 66 was building visitor centers, upgrading all the buildings, bathrooms, trails, increasing staffing. And the goal with most of the buildings was to make it so that the infrastructure of the buildings, the park housing, anything built was going to blend in with the environment.

We weren't going to have a stainless steel skyscraper sitting on top of Devils Tower or at Jewel Cave. We were going to build something that would blend in with the environment and really make it so that you could experience the park you were in as best as possible. And it became the new style — Park Service Modern was the architectural style. So if you go around national parks and you recognize some of these older buildings from the 1960s, they all start to look the same. Yeah, that's why. We liked the Park Service Modern plan.

And even here at Jewel Cave, even though it was at the tail end of Mission 66, our building still follows a lot of those same architectural features of trying to blend in with nature. A fun fact about our building here is it's a very weird shape, but that is because it was trying to mimic the shape of the calcite crystals that give Jewel Cave its name. Fun fact for you guys.

So that's the first 50 years of our National Park Service. There was a lot going on, but it continued on. And don't worry, I'm not going to make you all listen to me talk about every single one of these laws and policies I have on the screen behind me. But there's a lot. And over the years more and more laws and policies started to come out as we figured out what do we need to make the National Park Service work to protect our public lands as best we can.

How many of you have been to a National Park just to go and have some fun? I'm hoping everyone's going to raise their hand. If not, I don't know why you're here, but I'm glad you are! Alright, up until 1970 recreation was not part of our plan. We wanted to protect the area for you all to enjoy it, but we weren't necessarily aiming for recreation. But then in 1970 it was recognized — yeah, recreation is important. It is vital for you to be able to experience your public lands and enjoy your time here. And so we started to get national recreation areas. Their primary purpose is to allow you to recreate in the resources that you have.

After that, after many of these laws and policies started to come in, started to adjust, the National Park Service changed our mission, changed our policies as we learned more and more.

And then, as the Park Service started to move into the 21st century, we started to realize: OK, well, how we managed things in 1916 worked great for us then, but now we need to learn a little bit more. So we started to look at our policies and how we manage the parks and figure out how we wanted to move forward. And one of those things that we did is in 1992 experts from all over the country, in and out of the National Park Service, came together in a conference.

And essentially they sat down and said: How do we move forward? What do we want to do? In all of those discussions they eventually came out with a report that we now call the Vail Agenda. And that report boiled down to a couple key points, but a big one is that we need to keep managing the parks, but we need to base it in science. We can't just say, “Those bighorn sheep are really cool, we want to protect them.” We need to study those bighorn sheep. We need to learn: how many are there, how many do we need in order to have a healthy herd, do we have too many, do we not have enough?

Like you can see in the picture here, we have bats — especially here at Jewel Cave. These are pictures from Jewel Cave. We have bats here, and yeah, we love having the bats, but we need to study them so we can make more informed decisions. So we will trap our bats and take measurements, study them, identify them. And in our other picture we have one of our rangers doing vegetation management. We love the plants here, we have them all over the place, but some of the plants are not supposed to be here. And the only reason we know that is by studying them. We are trying to ground any management decision in scientific research, not just saying, “That looks cool, let's do that.” That is how I make my decisions sometimes.

And all of that to say we are continuing to move forward into modern times and we have continued to learn more and more. So what started as a very small land management agency of about 14 national parks — it actually started with one really big national park, but initially it had 37 parks and monuments — now we have over 400 park units and we administer everything from nationally important historic sites all the way to premier natural resources as well. And so we are also a leader in multiple fields of scientific and historic research because we are here studying our parks, studying everything that we experience so that you all can come out and continue to learn more and more.

And that kind of leads me back to our mission. The National Park Service preserves unimpaired, so we are able to do that by that scientific research for this and future generations. And that's why we are preserving it, so that you, your friends, your family, your descendants, or your friends' descendants can eventually come here and learn more and more about the parks and experience them in the same ways that you did.

So that's a very brief history of the National Park Service. Does anyone have any questions about anything? Or about the national parks in general, not just the history?

To be considered like guidelines that an area has to have — yeah, so that is a great question. In order to be considered for a National Park you need to have a resource that is significant in some way. For example, Yellowstone had those geothermal features and just the beautiful grand scenic views. And that is then created, designated by Congress. So it takes an act of Congress to create a National Park, any National Park. And so not only do you need that significant resource, you also need backing, usually by locals or local Political members. And they will be able to kind of back that. For Congress, for national monuments like us, we have to have a significant natural or scientific resource. So here at Jewel Cave, we had a cave that was pretty unique with the crystal, and so we were able to be protected because of that.

For a lot of the national parks and monuments that are getting created now, they are already public lands in some form. A lot of the more recent national parks were already part of the National Park Service; a lot of them were already national monuments and then just got changed into a national park.

So at this point, it has to be significant either naturally or historically in some form. And unfortunately, I can't really give you a good explanation except for what other parts we have around here. So it's not the best answer, but it's the best I can give you.

You guys for joining me — if you have any questions, I'm happy to answer them.

Join Ranger Kierstan and learn the history of the National Park Service.

Life of Cave Explorer Jan Conn

Transcript

Hello and welcome to Jewel Cave National Monument’s 125 years of discovery podcast, Discovery Hour. Join us this episode as we listen to a presentation on the life of cave explorer Jan Conn presented by Ranger Britney. Recorded on March 29, 2025, a transcript of this episode is available on our website www.nps.gov/JECA thank you for listening.

I’m Ranger Britney, and I’m an education member here. I handle outreach, interpretation, and things like that. So, it's Women's History Month, and it's also the 125th year of discovery here at Jewel Cave. So, we're doing a little speaker presentations about every month, and it’s Women's History Month, so we're talking about a very important woman and her history in the area. We're going to be talking about Jan Conn.

So, she is a pioneer in cave exploration and climbing. This is a direct quote from Jan Conn: “Oh, who am I? Well, I'm Jan Conn. I've always been a misfit in the normal world, but I've found a place for misfit.”

Right. Jan Conn is from Maryland. She grew up with two sisters. Her mom—her mom was a huge influence in her life—and she told her, well, just to grow up as a free spirit. As long as you're not hurting anybody, I'm OK. And essentially, I think she did, you know. She’s a pioneer cave explorer here in our area. She got us over 65 miles of mapped passage, and she also set routes in the Needles. She wasn’t only a caver or climber; she was also a creative spirit. She liked playing the flute, she yodeled, liked playing the guitar, and in her later years made little rubber stamps.

Along the Potomac River—so this is a quote from Jan Conn: “When you're learning to climb it's handy to have a river below you.” She began climbing along the Potomac River in Maryland, near Washington, D.C. And next to her in this photo, this is Herb Conn. And when you talk about Jan Conn, you’re really not going to be able to not talk about Herb Conn. This is her partner in life. They did everything together, and they say that they fell in love with climbing, and then they fell in love with each other.

When asked, “Well, how did you get into climbing?” she said that they climbed out of the crib and then just never stopped; it just kept going. And that she climbed her entire life, but she really didn't learn how to use ropes and safety material until she was along the Potomac River. In that area she joined the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club, and that's where she learned to tie ropes, knots, and pitons and various things like that. Along this river she climbed on Carder Rock, and she wasn't just learning to climb in the area. She also pioneered there too. She set routes like Jan's Face and Ronnie’s Leap, which is named after their dog.

And this is the early years. So yeah, they were pioneers in caving and climbing, but also in something else known as dirtbag living. And you hear that and you’re kind of like, oh no—that's like a badge of honor in the climbing community. They gave up everything, all the little comforts and luxuries in life, so they had more time to climb. So right here: “It's a simple matter of mathematics. Two people working six months a year are just as good as one person working twelve months to support two people.”

So they would quit their jobs—and it was odd jobs, whatever they could find. They worked at dude ranches, ski resorts; one winter they sold fish and chips, right, so just about anything. But then during the summers they’d load up in their truck, the panel truck, and they lived in it for quite a while. They said this is basically the first RV, and this is what they traveled the nation in. Their climbing carried along the Potomac River, but first in West Texas, up to California, over through to South Dakota and the Needles.

The Conn Route and Mapping the Unknown. They climbed over 200 Needles that they left registers on: “We didn't begin to get to the outlying areas. I think there were probably still masses of rock out there that nobody's ever laid a hand on.”

She came out here in 1947 and happened upon Custer State Park, and she just started climbing, right? They said they lived like two cats in an unattended fish market. One of the issues that they had with climbing and moving around too much was that it was getting a bit popular, it was picking up, and they didn't like waiting in line. But here—I mean, she said it herself—there's still rock out there that nobody even touched. And so here they set routes, and those are now popular nationwide, like the Conn Diagonal.

And back then they were free climbing. Nowadays when you think of climbing, you're thinking of all these like special, specialized gear—you know, special climbing shoes, harnesses. But what they would do is, they would use hemp rope, about 120 feet of it, and they would tie a little boat knot around. And the shoes that they used were Ked shoes, about two sizes too small. Depending on who you ask, she may have invented this first set of climbing shoes, but a bit controversial.

But yeah, and here she even talks about climbing, and you can see the style that they were climbing. Yeah, you're at the top. And she acknowledged it, right—she used 10-foot because it was cheap and it was accessible, but she did say, you know, if you fall from the high drop there's a good likelihood that it's going to snap, especially if it gets older. So just setting those routes in the method that she was doing back then was amazing. Even now, it's still amazing.

Right, and she was the first woman to climb Devils Tower without the stake ladder. Yeah. So this is a direct quote: “I was feeling particularly smug because I was the first woman to climb the tower without the aid of the old ladder which had long been out of use.” And this was in 1947. So when Herb and Jan first went to Devils Tower, they tried climbing it, but they were unable to because they needed a special permit that they didn't even know they needed to have. What happened was that Herb wrote a staff member at Rocky Mountain National Park—because there was nobody at Devils Tower that could write that permit for them and get their gear checked. So he just said, Jan and I want to climb Devils Tower. We have 120 feet of hemp rope, some pitons, and carabiners. And the man read it, he said OK, that's good, and he signed off on it, not even realizing that Jan was a woman until much later.

She climbed all the way up with Herb, and the story goes that, you know, Jan comes back down—she's feeling particularly smug—and Jan is down on the ground again, and she sees a brawny Minnesota man. And he looked at her and said, “So how does this work? Did he climb up a little bit and just pull you up?” And she got really, really upset with that. She said, OK, I'm going to do it again, and I'm going to do it with somebody who couldn’t possibly haul me up.

So in 1952, she does the first all-female ascent of Devils Tower with Jane Showacre: “I took a solemn vow that day that I would climb Devils Tower with someone who couldn’t have possibly hauled me up, someone who couldn't get all the credit for my straining muscles.”

And that was Jane Showacre, right here. Jane Showacre was a little girl, about 109 pounds, and Jan Conn was barely 100 pounds. She also learned to climb along the Potomac River, and that’s how Jan knew of her. She knew, OK, it was a hard climb that we’re doing, and this is somebody I can trust.

The only complaint that she had is that Jane liked taking a lot of photos. Jane would just be like, “OK, if you just step out to the side a little bit, it’d make for a better photo.” But yeah, they went up the same method. They brought the piton and the carabiners, and Jan led the first lead of Devils Tower.

Whenever they got back down to the ground, Jan saw—she described—another brawny Minnesota man. She said it could have been the same man, she didn’t know. But he looked at her and at Jane and said, “If those two can do it, it can’t be that hard.”

So, just a bit of diminishing her accomplishments. Even then, Jan said, well, I mean, it proves all the more that you’re doing stuff not for other people, but you’re doing it because you want to do it, and that’s what you want to do.

She had a deep, rich history in climbing. She set routes in the area, honestly all over the nation. She set history with Devils Tower, and then she went to caving: “I remember it was a real shock when we had a choice of going up to climb the spires or going down into Jewel—that we wanted to go down rather than up. That really shocked us, but we accepted that and had a ball.”

So it. Because in 1959 Herb and Jan had been living in the area for about 8 years, and it was the summer and she was out climbing with Herb and a friend of theirs known as Dwight Deal. He was a local geologist in the area, and he told them, “My actual passion is caving.” He was a part of the National Speleological Society, and he had a special use permit for Jewel Cave.

And so that permit allowed him to come in here and to the cave system to explore and to map it out. And so in September of 1959 Jan, Herb, and Dwight Deal went into Jewel Cave and started mapping it out, and Dwight taught them how to survey the cave system. So back then we were about 2 miles. We were a really small cave.

And to do so what they would do is that they’d send one person ahead, and whenever they lost sight of the headlight they would stop. And so that could be anywhere from 2 feet to 200 feet depending on how bendy and what the cave looked like. And then they would use steel tape to measure that, and then they would draw that map out by hand. On the surface they would update it. So she came down here, and she just fell in love with it. It was a mild diversion into a lifelong exploration. She dived all the way in. And right here you can see an example of the map. This is the extent of Jewel Cave in June 1962. So back then the cave entrance right over here and they would take off, keep caving through Milk River. To go past Milk River you need a special use permit, and currently we’re not right here. And you can see the route that she established in getting us over to the Target Room.

There was a sign at the entrance that said it was a small cave, which they thought it was at that time. They just didn’t look under the right rock to find where it went.

OK, then in 1959 we were a small cave. We thought we had about 2 miles of passage, and all those cave tours were running from the historic entrance, which is about a mile west of us. And at that point in time too, word was going around that maybe Jewel Cave wasn’t up to national park standards. We were just too small.

But Jan Conn mapped over 65 miles of passage. And the route that I’m assuming most of you will do today—the Scenic Tour, the Discovery Tour—she knocked that out too. Heard some of us talking about the Wild Caving Tour? She also mapped that out.

And so at this point in time she broke past Milk River. She found plenty of leads, and she really established us as not just a small cave. Small cave no more—we are a very large cave. Now we’re at 220 miles. She got us over 65 miles of passage, and she left her legacy here, gave us a good foothold to stand on. And our cave length is only building. We’re learning so much more, and she made this a place of discovery for years to come.

And she was also a woman of many talents, like I talked about earlier: “When I knew more than someone else, I gave a lesson. When they knew more, I took the lesson.”

So I told you she liked playing the guitar, and when she was a little girl she couldn’t afford a flute so she played on a broken broom handle. It wasn’t until high school that she was finally able to access the flute. She was able to pick it up fairly quickly. And she also liked yodeling. So I’m going to play two songs for us of hers—the original songs—and I haven’t been able to find them anywhere online, so it’s pretty special that we get to hear them today.

Alright, the first one that I’m going to play for us is Poor Old Turtle.

A turtle lives within his shell, He thinks he has it made. Through winter storms and summer sun, He’s always in the shade. No one can touch him where he lives Or hurt a tender spot. He never takes and he never gives, Seclusion is his lot. Poor old turtle, can’t find what it’s about. Poor old turtle, keeping everyone out. Poor old turtle, can’t find how to begin. Poor old turtle, holding everything in. A turtle never knows the feeling of a friendly hand. He never knows the touch of a tender hand. He never learned to trust in others, sharing what they do. If you extend a helping hand, he’ll snap it right in two. Poor old turtle, can’t find what it’s about. Poor old turtle, keeping everyone out. Poor old turtle, can’t find how to begin. Poor old turtle, holding everything in. Don’t ever hide yourself away beneath the turtle shell. So open up your heart to others, let them trust in you. You’ll find a special kind of joy in everything you do.

This other Jan Conn song is called Sad Story.

With a yodel, with a yodel, I used to have a sister who would yodel with me. We used to sing together with a yodel. Everywhere we went we’d sing and yodel if we could, And folks would clap and then they’d ask for more. Our yodel used to carry throughout the neighborhood, And folks would come a-screaming through the door, oh yes they would, To hear our yodeling, to hear our yodeling. We practiced very hard to sing our yodeling. Each day we made the echoes ring with yodeling. We thought if we sang with passion we could get to Tennessee, That we would be a national sensation if folks would only let us sing in Grand Ole Opry. We’d soon be famous across the nation, oh yes siree, Because of yodeling, because of yodeling. But then it happened. It didn’t happen to me. I still went yodeling, I still went yodeling. But my sister, my poor sister—she went yodeling, she went yodeling. What happened was she went up, but she couldn’t get back down. So sad. A promising career nipped in the bud. I suppose I could have gone to Nashville without her, But when you’re used to going yodeling with somebody, It isn’t any fun to go yodeling alone. But I will say this for my sister: even though she couldn’t get her voice back down, She didn’t let it get her down. As a matter of fact, if you ever get to New York City And go to the Metropolitan Opera, You’ll still hear her singing in the chorus. She goes— [yodel].

Right, so Jan Conn, as you can see, was incredibly talented, multifaceted. Not only caving, climbing, but she was a wonderful musician too.

And in her later life—well, she lived here in Custer—and, “I like to go slowly on my walk because the slower you walk the more details you see.” So once she was no longer able to cave or climb, she’d just go and walk, soak everything in. And at this point in time, well, she had a little cat named Vixon. It was a girl cat, and she said that she didn’t adopt Vixon. Vixon adopted her. Vixon just showed up, and that was her cat, and she was her friend. They’d go on little nature walks, and when it was raining outside they’d stay in, draw, and make little rubber stamps.

Now, as for the cave food, cave bread is pretty popular around here. “People often ask us what we eat in the cave. Our lunches consist almost entirely of a loaf we bake ourselves, a combination of Logan bread (a mountaineer’s staple) and applesauce cake. We recommend it—cave bread—for any sort of outdoor lunch, or indoors too for that matter. It is a concentrated food with a minimum bulk and is palatable even when water is scarce.”

And it’s a mixture of Logan bread and applesauce bread. I do have some for us to try if we would be interested in that?

And now the last slide—you could pass out. Any questions that we may have?

Yeah, so she had been caving before, but she said that she was a Jewel Cave caver and not just a caver. She did cave in another cave, but nothing.

How long did she and Herb live? She passed in 2023, so yeah, she lived a very long life.

Oh, so she finished high school, and then in college she studied music, but she followed that dirt bag lifestyle. She gave everything into climbing, and that's where she gained all her experience. Dwight just knew, “OK, she's a very strong climber,” and oftentimes that translates into the cave too. She just dedicated all of her time. This isn't a question, but just another addition to her multifaceted talent: up until shortly before she passed away, she and a group of women got together regularly. They had a wood shop and made beautiful things—not just long-crafted, beautiful wooden furniture. She had beautiful works of wood and leather that she made. Again, I don't know where her talent came from, yeah, incredible.

Whenever she settled in Custer, she still needed some source of income, and she knew that getting a full-time job wasn’t the way to go. She didn’t want to live on the grid either, so they did some other work. Some of the first climbing harnesses you’ll see were made out of leather, and she etched them out herself. She had mail-order subscriptions that were just filling out to people.

And then we can try the cave bread. Let me do a run-through of the ingredients just in case anybody has allergies or dietary restrictions: we have some whole wheat flour. The original recipe calls for powdered milk; I didn’t have that, so I used oat milk. There’s molasses, vegetable shortening, nutmeg, clove, honey, applesauce, and sugar.

OK, 12 ounces of sugar—that's a lot of sugar. And then she says if you want to make it a bit more palatable, you can sprinkle it with a bit of cinnamon and sugar. That’s a little too much; they probably wouldn’t have brought this loaf in there—it would just crumble around. That is the closest we’re going to get now, and we’re welcome to try it.

You mentioned she lived off the grid. Yeah, she and Herb sunk their savings and bought some land just east of Custer, about a 4-mile walk through the woods to the spires. There was already a little outcrop in the area, and they just built a little area. Originally the plan was just a tool shed because they were accustomed to living in the truck, but they looked at the tool shed and said, “We’ll just live here.” So, they put a little platform down and built the bed.

They lived in the “Conncave” and fully off-grid. They would go down to the river to collect water. They didn’t have electricity or heat in the typical way you might think nowadays—they just got logs, put them in their wood stove, and burned them.

She learned to climb along the Potomac River—but what creek was she collecting water from? I apologize; I’m not sure of the name of the creek off the top of my head.

Did she live out there her whole life? Not her whole life. She moved out there in 1951, and then she lived there from that property. She didn’t pass away in that property; she passed at a friend’s home. But she did live there a long time. She was like 99.

I was able to see a photo in the archive of the dual plate stamp with all the little nail head spar on there. That is a replica of the one she carved out for us.

What about books? She has a few books. She has The Jewel Cave Adventure, which she wrote with Herb—I believe it may be in the visitor center. She also has various climbing guides, and she worked for a magazine for a bit for the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club. They had a magazine running through called The Mile High, with little articles.

Do you have a favorite fact that you learned about her? Thank you. Yeah

Join Ranger Britney and learn about the life of Jan Conn.

Becoming a National Monument

Transcript

Hello and welcome to Jewel Cave National Monument’s 125 years of discovery podcast Discovery Hour. Join us this episode as we listen to a presentation on Jewel Cave becoming a National Monument, presented by Ranger Aimee, recorded on February 7th, 2025. A transcript of this episode is available on our website www.nps.gov/jeca. Thank you for listening.

Yeah, I'm Ranger Aimee. I've been here at Jewel Cave for about 3 and a half years. I've been a park ranger for the National Park Service and get to wear this awesome green and green uniform for about 15 years. Got my start back in Missouri when I was in college, 2010, at a little Civil War battlefield as a seasonal ranger for a couple of years. Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico, Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park in Colorado, and then I moved out to California. I was there for about 8 and a half years, 3 and a half years at Muir Woods National Monument north of San Francisco, and then 5 years at Lava Beds National Monument. Partway up we actually lived in Oregon when—yeah, yeah—and there are maybe other lava tubes in Idaho but—Idaho, yeah, in Idaho. Close, yeah, Klamath Falls, so about 2 and a half hours south of there. Yeah, so I really enjoyed that, but I love being here at Jewel Cave. For some reason when I was at Lava Beds I was like, I really want to work there. It just seems like kind of an underdog story in a way that we'll be talking about today, kind of from when the cave got made basically about 1933. And I'm presenting today with—introduce yourself.

So my name is Jacob Dalland. I'm an ACE member. ACE stands for American Conservation Experience, a partnership with the National Park Service, so that's how I'm here. I've only been here since November 12th, but I have a background in both geology and history. Both of those fields are quite relevant to Jewel Cave, more so the geology in general, but history especially in terms of this presentation. And yeah, I think that's about it.

Well thanks, Jacob. Yeah, you’re welcome to stand or sit down if you want, because I'll kind of take over the beginning of the presentation, then Jacob will take it away here in a bit. But first of course going to do a little plug. You all are here for our Discovery Hours, greatly appreciate it, and we are doing these to celebrate the 125 years that Jewel Cave has been known. Today we're celebrating when Jewel Cave officially became a monument, February 7th of 1908, but we believe that people first found the cave—actually went into it, I should say—in September of 1900. So we're celebrating this as our 125 years of people going in the cave, exploring it, knowing about it and such. So we're hoping to do these talks monthly. We began them in December, and who did our first talk? Sydney.

That was her, yeah.

Sydney is loaded. I didn't even come, but I knew it was loaded because I just saw the little preview. But she did a talk about geology of the entire Black Hills. Then we kind of worked our way down to geology just of Jewel Cave, and then again today we're kind of talking about how Jewel Cave became a monument, how we got protected after the cave was officially found and such. But I just wanted to do a plug for that. Like I said, we'll be hopefully doing them monthly. In the summer we might even have two a month, so just follow us on our shows through media—that’s where we have it on our website, also social media. We're just sharing more often on our Facebook and our Instagram. And we'll be doing other really exciting things for our 125 years as well, so just stay tuned. Monthly we're hoping to discover something new ourselves and also for our visiting public. So that's kind of our theme—discover something new here at Jewel Cave every month—prior to wrapping up the discovery in September, because that's again when the discovery anniversary was. So thank you all for coming to our 3rd Discovery Hour.

Little plug, and so I did want—really quick—because this is your first time to Jewel Cave, and then you all have been here. And when was last time you were on a tour?

Yeah.

I did the tour last March.

Oh that’s right, that’s right, so last March.

Yeah, but he has been here.

I was first here 40 years ago, and I've been here several other times.

Oh, that's awesome.

So your geology might be a little rusty.

Yeah, yeah, a little bit, little bit.

You might got it.

So I can't go into as much detail as Sydney, but like I said, real quick—OK, you will probably—so this will sound familiar though.

Oh, that’s funny.

I'm more of a history background. I don't have geology and history like Jacob, but having worked in geology parks I appreciate it, especially if I think of it as more of a history. So here our geologic history is from like 300 million years to about 15 million, kind of in that range. And as you all might know—you maybe not just yet—but ultimately, long time ago, much of North America was covered in these inland seas. Within that, a lot of sea creatures had really nice calcium-rich bodies. They would die, compact at the bottom of that shallow sea, ultimately they made our limestone. In any case, that limestone is just kind of hanging out at the bottom of that shallow sea—all those compacted sea creatures, all those brachiopods—until there was a big uplift somewhere around 60 million years ago. So that big uplift made older rocks beneath the limestone go up to the surface. Have you all hiked Black Elk Peak before? And you probably haven’t done it yet.

It’s awesome—not right now, maybe a little icy—but those are some of the oldest rocks in the Black Hills. They all got pushed up to the top. Black Elk Peak is the highest point east of the Rocky Mountains. Wonderful views. Yeah, kind of, yeah, exactly, yeah, kind of like up in here, and Mount Rushmore as well would also be some of the older rocks. So we're kind of in this layer, because what happens—those older rocks got pushed up in the middle, and then the limestone layer was kind of on the outer edge. Water from that sea started to come down. It combined with a little bit of carbon dioxide in the soil to make a real diluted form of carbonic acid, and that’s what kind of worked away and made the passages that we have in the cave. The nice big Target Room you all got to see in the concert today—eventually the water drained out, there was a breakdown period. Did you all like all those nice rocks on the ground around you?

Yeah.

It's going to happen during the concert—no! Fortunately that was a really, really long time ago, and that’s probably somewhere around the 15 million year mark. After that, we do have some areas of the cave—you have been here, and have you been to other caves besides Jewel Cave?

Ohhh, my first one.

Gosh, great first cave to see.

Yes.

Other caves are more wet. They might have more like stalactites and stalagmites. We have some, but where water has dripped down and mineral deposits, it made those little spiky things grow. You didn't really see them in the Target Room, that area of the cave is pretty dry. But in any case, most of the cave is pretty dry, and after that breakdown period it was probably pretty quiet until about 1900, and that’s where we get to mainly what we're going to talk about today. But does Wind Cave? They also have some, but they're also pretty dry, and it is really funny that we’re both two—there’s a lot of caves in the Black Hills, dozens of them, I think it’s around 200 actually—and they're all a little different. I feel like some of the smaller caves have been able to find some of their more wet rooms. Rushmore Cave I think has more of the flowstone-looking features. I think there’s also a Crystal Cave out near Hermosa. But us and Wind Cave are both pretty dry. So they have some, but not too many, and I think it's estimated like 5 percent of Jewel Cave is wet.

So Jewel Cave—again, it was just kind of quiet for a very long time. Native Americans have lived in the area for thousands of years. They might have known about the opening, but it was really small, almost the size—anyone finished with their plates? You can hold them up—it’s about the size of that. Yeah, and so maybe a very small child would be able to fit that, but there isn’t any evidence to show that. So the first folks who officially get credited with finding the opening, popping in it—and see if they pop up first, I don’t know how to do my animations—Frank and Albert Michaud. They both have pretty good mustaches, but I'm pretty sure judging by another picture that this is Frank, and this is Albert, I'm pretty sure. But yeah, it was—it’s hard to tell them apart. But they were riding, we believe, on September 18th of 1900, riding horses in Hell Canyon with a friend of theirs named Charles Bush, and they hear a whistling noise. They have a typical “we found a cave” story. Other caves I've worked at, they’re like hunting and an animal runs in. But often Wind Cave was also a noise that attracted people to the cave. So they come upon that little dinner plate-sized hole, realize they can't fit in it, but they're pretty curious about it. Because, like a lot of people at the time, they had come to the area for mining. So very excited, they’re like, maybe this is it, we’re going to find our riches. And if you want to make a rock hole bigger, what are you going to get?

Dynamite. So they—I guess it's 1900, I guess they just had that handy—you know, they come back, go to their junk drawer, they get their dynamite, they blast that hole open. They're pretty excited about what they see, and then I have a few pictures of the opening. But I should say, this is a ranger—his last name is Lynch, Lyle Lynch—he came upon and started working the park in the 1930s. So the opening—they didn't blast it quite this big, but just to show you what it looks like a little bit. But in any case, no matter how big the opening, it didn’t matter. There wasn't anything super valuable in there. Even though it was sparkly, it was pretty. The calcite crystals that you all maybe got to see in the Target Room do indeed sparkle like jewels. But like you and Sydney were chatting about, no actual diamonds have been found. But they were hopeful that maybe they could find gold, silver, manganese, and iron. So that’s what—I can probably go to my next slide I guess.

A month later was Halloween, which I guess—I don't know if they celebrated Halloween at this point—but it was like October 31, 1901. That's whenever they first staked their mining claim, and that's kind of what they claimed that they were hopefully going to find. They again, they pretty quickly realized it was really soft, and so they're like, well maybe we should also think about developing this for tourism like Wind Cave. And have you all been to Wind Cave before?

Probably yes.

And that’s your second cave.

Yeah.

And they just got their elevators renovated. They just reopened for cave tours within like a week, so it's definitely a cool park. They're more known for a feature called boxwork. They have some calcite crystals like we do, but boxwork is really cool, like webbed-looking features in the rock. But in any case, Wind Cave has been known about also for a long time—probably even longer. It's a sacred site for the Lakota culture. They didn’t go in it, but they knew of the opening.

1880s is kind of when Euro-Americans started to find the opening, pop in it, and a really fortunate thing for Wind Cave National Park—it wasn’t Wind Cave National Park, I should say, but Wind Cave—was that it was near to a train. So they could pretty easily—and I don’t know what railroad line, but apparently from Hot Springs there was a train that went by Wind Cave. So they were able to do pretty well with tourism.

And so maybe they just wanted people to go in the cave. The Michauds and Charles Bush, and wear hats like that, I don’t know, but this is in, I would say, this is apparently in a room called the Odd Fellows Room because it kind of looks like the rings of the Odd Fellow Society. I was like, and then in this picture is a former governor as well as William Jennings Bryan, who was a presidential candidate. So you got some pretty well-to-do visitors, had a really good community support, made money, and it was the McDonald family who initially started guiding people. And the Michauds were like, and Charles Bush, “That sounds great. Let’s do that.”

So they started making developments, and within about a year they had widened paths, they had stairs in the cave, they had a mile and a half trail that they built from whatever mediocre road was from Custer to Newcastle—it wasn’t great. They did have like a little path right up to the cave entrance, and they also built a cabin. They also tried to make some like fun things happen, so they created the Jewel Cave Dance Club. And that’s one reason we’ve really sought to bring some music to the cave with the concert that we had today.

But does anyone dance? There wasn’t really dancing music. That’s OK—come back in September. We’re hoping out in our historic area, where our initial ranger station is, to have a concert in September to kind of accumulate the year of discovery. That might be more dancing-like, we’ll see. But in any case, they did these different things. And it’s hard to take pictures in a cave, as you all probably discovered today, especially when you can’t use flash.

So ultimately the only pictures we really have of those developments that I have, like from roughly around the time, are of the cabin that they built. But unlike Wind Cave, unfortunately they didn’t have a railroad that went right by the cave, so their tourism venture wasn’t working out very good. Just from Custer to Jewel Cave it took about a half-day ride on a horse, and sometimes it’s like a full tour of 30 people. I’ll ask, “Who would like to spend, you know, a half-day on horse to get here?”

We did have the rodeo queens here this morning—they might have been like, “Yeah.” But most people, they’re not gonna wanna do a half-day horseback ride to get here, so the tourism adventure wasn’t great. Charles Bush, after a few years—they had a mining claim they all three pooled in on—by about 1905, Charles Bush was like, “I’m out.” And they somehow found a woman named Bertha King Richard from Saint Louis, Missouri, but she invested in it. She never made any of the infrastructures that they did, but she apparently had the money, and so she became kind of their third person.

So they just kind of continued making developments, but they just weren’t super fruitful. But that was their whole plan: make a mining claim, then do enough developments to maintain that mining claim, maybe eventually we’ll make some money on that tourism. But yeah, it just wasn’t really panning out. But finally in 1906 the town of Custer starts to care just a little bit about the cave because they are starting to think, well, maybe it would be nice to have a cave like Wind Cave near us and to promote it and get people to come.

And the visitors that did trickle from Custer to here—it is pretty, it’s a really neat-looking cave. So they started getting a little bit of community support, just enough to kind of get some word out and for somebody to come and kind of think about it. And ultimately too, Jewel Cave was surrounded by National Forest. It was formerly called the Harney National Forest, today the Black Hills National Forest.

And so they’re like, we could be a game preserve within that National Forest. The initial plan was pretty big—it was like Jewel Cave is going to be Jewel Cave Game Preserve, will be 38,000 acres, and it will have some springs for grazing. Won’t allow any additional mining claims, but you can do some settlements on there. And the town of Custer was like, well, it’s kind of what we wanted, but we still want to be able to graze and we don’t like the idea that we can’t do any new mining claims. So what it boiled down to was instead, let’s just make 1,200 acres a National Monument through something the president could do through the Antiquities Act.

So that’s what ended up happening today, 117 years ago. And so we have the initial proclamation from Theodore Roosevelt—he was the president at the time—and then a little telegram that got sent. It’s really funny to read through our history, and you know it wasn’t like an instant like, you know, just on Facebook like how it is now. It took a while for word to get around.

But in any case, the Antiquities Act is pretty interesting. That allows the president to declare small places national monuments. It doesn’t have to go through congressional approval or anything. So I’ll toss it to Jacob to talk a bit more about that. Go ahead Jacob, take it away. The Antiquities Act was actually pretty new when Jewel Cave was declared a national monument. So only two years before, in 1906, Congress approved the Antiquities Act, which as Aimee said empowers the president to declare national monuments.

So in this picture we have George W. Bush signing one of those acts. That one happened to be one that actually is a marine national monument stretching across many seamounts and various seashores of the farther Hawaiian Islands. And the name for that one I definitely can’t pronounce, but it’s in the Hawaiian language.

So the Antiquities Act at least originally appeared to be about conserving archaeological resources and also items of scientific interest. So when we think about Jewel Cave, it doesn’t really have a lot of archaeology, especially from what predated the Michauds. But what it does have are all of the nice crystals—the jewels, as it were—of the cave. So those items of scientific interest are what made Congress and President Theodore Roosevelt agree that Jewel Cave should be preserved as a national monument under the Antiquities Act.

So, yeah, Theodore Roosevelt signed us as a national monument on this day in 1908. And next we have just what exactly national monuments do

So national monuments are supposed to conserve resources, as I mentioned, that are archaeological or of scientific interest. But they can also change hands and sizes, and even they can change from a national monument to national park.

So here we have Devil’s Tower, which was the first national monument and has stuck. But on the left you may recognize that as Grand Canyon. So Grand Canyon was one of those national parks which started off as a national monument.

And national monuments are always created from pre-existing federal land. So since this area was already part of the Black Hills Forest Reserve, we were able to create that national monument from land on the forest. But private lands can also be donated from owners like farmers, ranchers, that kind of thing, to add on to those national monument boundaries. But either way, the president usually determines the size of the national monument according to what is the precise size needed to conserve those resources.

So for example with Jewel Cave, we made sure to conserve that part of the cave that was already known about, which was less than two miles by that point. Now of course we’ve got all kinds of passageways extending outside the national monument boundaries, although technically that too is protected as part of the national monument.

And then Congress can also declare national monuments as part of this Antiquities Act, but it’s oftentimes just the president.

And so over the decades there has been some debate over what exactly a national monument is supposed to protect. Like I said, originally it appeared like national monuments were for archaeological resources and also items of scientific interest, but that debate has kind of focused on how large national monuments can really be—whether they should be conserving just small areas or vast areas of land, or whether they’re supposed to really be for offshore locations in exclusive economic zones on the seafloor. So here we have some marine turtles on one of the marine national monuments which I’ve mentioned before. So that monument conserves both seafloor and some of the atolls and shallow islands. So that kind of leads us to some local differences that have arisen in two states, namely Alaska and Wyoming, about how much power the president should really have in the Antiquities Act and whether he should seek congressional approval before creating national monuments.

That image is of one of the national monuments in Alaska—I don’t remember which one—but either way that was one of the national monuments that Jimmy Carter back in 1979 created that caused a bit of a stir within the state of Alaska. Because you know, Jimmy Carter just basically went by his own authority, didn’t consult Congress, when Alaska kind of thought maybe he should have. But of course most states are usually fine with the president not asking, but I guess not Alaska in this case. Same thing with Wyoming back in 1933 when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt decided to sign Jackson Hole National Monument into law. So Jackson Hole National Monument is now Grand Teton National Park. But once again, Wyomingites apparently didn’t really like how he didn’t ask them first—or rather ask them through their representatives in Congress—whether they should think that that part of the state should be a national monument. So these days both Alaska and Wyoming require at least some congressional approval before the Antiquities Act can actually be passed to make National Monuments in those states.

So now I’ll hand it back to Aimee.

Right. Right yeah so Jacob was mentioning that there are, you know, there’s national monuments not all just with like the National Park Service. Especially at the time that Jewel Cave became a National Monument the National Park Service didn’t exist yet. National Park Service did not exist until 1916. The Forest Service did, so initially that was who we were kind of lumped with and again we were surrounded completely by a National Forest so that made the most sense. So we’re a number of national monuments that were, and actually my prior part Lava Beds National Monument first got established in 1925, we were also initially just kind of lumped in and protected with the National Forest that called the Modoc National Forest that we were surrounded by. But any case, initially protected by the Forest Service. So today you’ll see my patch, National Park Service.

And a little bit of just how it was when the Forest Service first was managing the site. And here we just have an old map of the Black Hills National Forest as well as a picture of initially the first forester and one of the first leaders of the Forest Service, Gifford Pinchot. In any case, Forest Service was also pretty new at the time that Jewel Cave got set aside. It was only first made as it had a different name at first, but in 1881, about 1891 within 10 years or about 15 little what they called forest reserves all around the country. It wasn’t being super well managed so Gifford Pinchot—it was pretty funny—he was from a very well-to-do family. He’s a really interesting guy to study, and his dad for whatever reason, he saw that his son really liked the outdoors and he’s like, you should be a forester. Like there aren’t any foresters, I’m going to Yale? But in any case, he went to Yale, wasn’t able to really study forestry there, but he was able to go to Europe and study there and go amongst forests in like Germany and Switzerland and just learn a lot and bring that knowledge back to the United States and begin organizing national forests and really advocate we need better organization.

So that was able to happen in the early 1900s and again with getting these little monuments and these little forests and such. But it wasn’t, still wasn’t great. At least kind of got the name all established and such, but it was, yeah, it was just kind of lumped in. We didn’t really get a lot of people from the Forest Service out to Jewel Cave. They maybe just popped in the cave like once or twice a year. Their bag was definitely more the surface above. Why do we have this cave, we don’t want to go in there. They wouldn’t want to go in there without an actual guide, which is pretty much the Michauds.

And the really big hope was—I think I can maybe switch to my next slide?—the really big hope was just a token mining photo here of anybody in the Black Hills. This isn’t even the Michauds, to me it looked very much like people mining but the hope was whenever it became part of Forest Service with the Michauds and especially Bertha Cain, because again she was just like an investor, she hadn’t built any infrastructure, she wasn’t really that interested in that, she really wanted some return on her claim. So when Forest Service takes over, especially Bertha was like, can we get some money for our claim? Can we sell it to you? The Forest Service didn’t have any way—I mean they’re very new, they’re still trying to organize and such—they didn’t have any way to pay them for their claim.

So Bertha’s really bummed about this and she’s like, you know what, I’m out. So 1908, Bertha’s out. Albert eventually started getting kinda discouraged as well because the Forest Service, like I said, they didn’t go in the cave very much but the main thing they were interested in is this: is it actually like of any value you all have? They actually at this point had five mining claims, not just the Jewel Cave tunnel lode that it was called, but they had four others. Are you all actually finding any iron, any gold, any silver, any manganese of any paying portions? And the reports are showing that they didn’t. So it’s not being profitable, they’re not going to pay Bertha or the Michauds. And so again Bertha was out, and Albert eventually moved to Canada, that’s where their father was from, he moved back to Canada. So at this point the mining claims investigations aren’t panning out, it’s not looking like it’s going very good and that it’s going to be profitable. And so they’re not going to get paid for it. Everyone’s out, with Frank Michaud, who had at that point gotten married, started to have a family and decided to kinda live by the cave. And they were allowed by the Forest Service to continue with their not-so-great mining claims as long as they continued doing infrastructure updates. So he at least kept doing that and getting one of his sons named Ira involved in that. So again, please keep doing that. But it wasn’t going great.

And so ultimately it was like, we need more support. And so there was something called the Custer Commercial Club. So the Custer Commercial Club—and there was a Forest Service representative who started chatting with Peter Norbeck, he is a former senator who also became governor of South Dakota, believe the 9th governor—talked to him when he was still a senator and was like, we need to get support from the Custer Commercial Club to get like a superintendent for Jewel Cave, to get like infrastructure paid for, maybe we should give money to the Michauds for the claim. You know unfortunately that wasn’t working.

And so Frank at this point is like, I’m very discouraged. He started locking the cave because it was getting vandalized. They weren’t getting support from the Forest Service. So let’s just call it, let’s just lock it up. So it wasn’t going very well, even though they at least kind of got some bigwigs to come in. So something they had a little bit of success from was fortunately the Jewel Cave Corporation.

Because I said the Michauds are frustrated, they’re starting to lock the cave, the Forest Service is only visiting a time or two a year, they don’t really want to go in there very bad, and even whenever the person reached up and got support from Peter Norbeck, again that’s not going very well. And eventually I should also mention the Forest Service started locking the cave with a different lock than the Michauds had, so they didn’t love that. And Frank Michaud passed away in 1927 while he was visiting family in Canada.

So at this point the family, they’re all alone, they have this claim but they’re not getting anything for it. But here again comes the Jewel Cave Corporation, because what started to help things move a little bit better for little Jewel Cave—again all thought to be about two miles—was that the road between Custer and Newcastle was really crummy. Not so bad today, right? From Newcastle, and I drove from Custer, I think it’s pretty good, yeah it’s really nice. But there at the time, now we’re to like the late 1920s, that road was not very good. Frank died in 1927—road not so great.

So they’re like, Custer Commercial Club contacted the Newcastle Lions Club and like hey, can we get together and make a club for Jewel Cave? And maybe it’s right in the middle-ish, and it’s like 22 miles for you, I think 13 for us, so the middle. Let’s start something called the Jewel Cave Corporation. And the Forest Service leader was on board and those clubs were on board and they were able to raise some capital stock to get infrastructures made, to get the thought of a better road happening, and finally to pay the only person with any bit of a claim, Michaud, a little bit of money.

They were able to raise money to pay her $750. Inflation calculators I know aren’t like super accurate, just kind of looking that up this morning, that would’ve been around $13,000. So for 20-ish years of work, not great, but she was a widow with a family so it was something, so she took it. So at this point now the Michauds are out, Jewel Cave Corporation, they for the first time since the monument had become a monument in February of 1908, in 1928 they started doing tours. They weren’t dressed like this, this is what we dressed like today to kind of model actually in 1940s Ranger once we were Park Service, but I just thought that was a fun picture. But any case, they were leading tours initially and that was kind of some success finally thanks to the Jewel Cave Corporation and two towns like we have here today working together and getting that going.

Because the Forest Service again just didn’t really have the people to and they didn’t have the desire really to go into the cave. Now that they didn’t really have Frank Michaud to take them in, Ira knew a fair amount, so Ira was hired by the Jewel Cave Corporation to be one of the initial three people that they were able to hire for infrastructure builds. So that was something that was good. Thank you Jewel Cave Corporation.

And maybe because of all the really cool infrastructure things they were doing and all the money they were able to raise, finally we were able to reach the attention of the fairly new National Park Service, again just from 1916. Also could have been because Albert Michaud—he’s still living even though he’s in Canada—he wrote a letter to the former director of the National Park Service, Stephen Mather, being like Jewel Cave is not being very well taken care of by the Forest Service and I’m frustrated.

And so again probably a combination of that, the letter as well as hearing of things happening with the Jewel Cave Corporation, a representative from the National Park Service came to visit Jewel Cave in 1929. Apparently they were very impressed—yeah, that’s what they said: the cave has much beauty but crystals and less extraordinary variety can hardly hold the continued interest of visitors to the same extent as drip formations. And yeah by that I imagine they mean more of those stactites and stalagmites and things like that. It would seem that the cave is of local and statewide importance rather than of national interest.

And like I said, come on underdog story. So we didn’t really realize how much there was to Jewel Cave, but that’s another. But it’s kind of funny it stayed quiet even though we had a National Park Service representative visit in 1929. No movement, it was just kind of like we visited, we came, we saw, we’re going to leave, there’s really not much there. But randomly what happened was an executive order in August of 1933. FDR was trying to consolidate national monuments to save some money. The Great Depression is happening, and so 1933 an executive order he passed reorganized 70 national monuments away from the Forest Service and plunked them with the National Park Service. And at my former park, that was also the year that we went from Forest Service to Park Service.

So any case that’s where we officially became with the agency we’re with today. And after that you have some different things happen. Jewel Cave Corporation continued to do tours, so then Conservation Corps eventually came in to start doing infrastructure, and that’s kind of what we’ll continue on probably later this summer with the talk continuing the history of Jewel Cave, the underdog story, and finding out how we went from 2 miles to 220.33 that we know of today.

Yeah, and so again I’m Ranger Aimee, on behalf of myself, thank you all for joining our Discovery Hour today. Let us know if you have any questions, thank you. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Any questions? OK. Eat more cake. In the limestone country nobody has wells so you have to drill a million feet down. What’s this place? For water. I’d have to double check with our facilities Rangers but yes they probably know better, yeah. Well that yeah. And it’s the dead one yeah. No.

Learn the story of Jewel Cave becoming a national monument with Ranger Aimee.

Geology of Jewel Cave

Transcript

Hello and welcome to Jewel Cave National Monument’s 125 Years of Discovery Podcast, Discovery Hour. Join us this episode as we listen to a presentation on the formation of Jewel Cave presented by Mike Wiles, Jewel Cave’s Chief of Resource Management. Recorded on January 17,2025. A transcript of this episode is available on our website, www.NPS.GOV/JECA.

Thank you for listening . Audiences of any size, OK, but there's just a little bit different world when speaking out loud to everybody. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Just about. Yep. It's kind of like a tour with thirty people versus three. OK. So my name is Mike Wiles. I've been here forty five years. It started out as a volunteer cave explorer. I got indicating when I was in at South Dakota School of Mines, and I got a master or a bachelor’s in chemical engineering, which… but that's where I ran into a group of cavers that started caving.

Then I went back several years later and got a master's in geological engineering. And I wrote my thesis on the infiltration of groundwater at Wind Cave.

Jewel Cave. Have you ever visited any of the caves on the East Coast?

I've been on some in like one in North Carolina.

What about West Virginia?

I've been in West Virginia.

What was it? You remember?

Bowden's Cave. There's one right off of the highway.

It might be the real popular, you know, school kid, you know, because it's just off the highway.

If that's the one that I toured this past fall…

Well, it was not a developed cave.

OK, gotcha. OK.

It was just a wild cave. And I've been in some caves down where Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia intersect.

So what were those?

I've been to a few of…

That's my area.

I don't remember some of that was for NCRC, cave rescue training. So that's just where we had our operations, and I don't remember names.

OK. Yeah, I've done like Tumbling Rock and Cumberland Caverns and a couple caves

Yes. And I might have been a long time ago.

OK. Yeah, so I'm right. So that's a little bit of my background. So now when I started, I didn't know anything about geology. I started caving. So where do you find caves? Well, they're in limestone. What's limestone? Well, this is limestone, and that's different than this, which is sandstone. Sometimes they kind of look the same until you get up close. You know once your eye to it, you know what it… So that was my first geological information was limestone and sandstone.

I ended up really falling in love with caving, and that's why I went back to school for geological engineering. And there really wasn't much in the curriculum that talks specifically about caves so I had to kind of do a lot of things and special projects on my own in order to get some of that cave stuff.

And I learned a bit from some old-time professors. A couple of them are still alive. Most of them have passed away. Who really were kind of experts in their field, and they did personally share with me some of their views of the cave. But there just wasn't much written about the caves here in the Black Hills.

So I would take what I learned, and when I went caving here, I would try to apply that, you know, what I saw in the cave. It turned out an awful lot of what people said wasn't true. I could see how there was that impression. You know, for instance, when Jewel Cave was only a few miles long, you could draw a conclusion. But by the time you got up to a hundred and fifty miles long, that conclusion… it was, it was obviously didn't happen.

So that was kind of the beginning of my experience of kind of learning to figure out cave for myself. And one of the great advantages is I've been here forty five years. I can ponder over things, and things that seem right but later don't seem right, can figure it out again.

Where almost all geological stuff is done under contract, you've got a time to do it, only so much to do it. Or you're a graduate, you got so much time to do a couple years and you got to wrap it up. And you don't even realize that there are loose ends, but there are. And I've had the advantage of just keep plugging away at it.

So the origin of Jewel Cave and its relationship to landscape scale processes. How does that sound?

This is a… well, this pointer won't work, so I have to do this. This is a map of kind of a 3D perspective of the Black Hills. Not in great detail. It's fairly old, but it shows generally how the Black Hills are shaped. It's not like a big… it's kind of a low bubble. If you fly over it in an airplane and you get up to that level for, well, just beyond where everything looks like toy cars going down the road. And it's kind of shocking to see how flat it really is, even with Harney Peak being at the highest point. Now it's Black Elk Peak, the highest point in the east of the east of the and up in here, this is almost as high as Harney Peak.

Forgive me for always saying Harney Peak. I haven't made that adjustment. They've changed the name several years ago.

The cave is found in this Paleozoic band of sedimentary rock. Some, but not all, of this is part is called the Pahasapa Limestone. When it goes underground, it's called the Madison Aquifer. And almost everyone uses the term Pahasapa Limestone and Madison Limestone interchangeably. There's a little bit of difference, but if I switch back and forth, talking about the same thing.

So there's Jewel Cave right there, and we're going to look at it a little more carefully. It's a three-dimensional maze with only one known natural entrance, and that right there is sight light.

Why is that? There's gotta be a reason for that.

And it used to be that people would say, well, the cave formed three hundred million years ago after the pahasapa was deposited, but before the sandstones up above it were deposited. And then the cave, an old paleo cave, formed. And it was just like random. And then when, after all the stuff up above was deposited, the canyon came down and randomly intersected the cave. And that's where you got the entrance. And that's where I said, when we only knew of this much passage, you could say that. But by the time we got this much passage, you could see that's not true. Here's lithograph. And there's only one place right here that you can get across from a big mazy area through a tiny little opening where it goes under the canyon, back into a big maze area.

Is that the opening you have to fit through, or no?

What?

Is that the opening out here?

No, no, this is just a connection underground. The only known natural entrance is right here.

So is it possible that there's a lot more today that's just not been…?

Oh yes. We think we've only discovered three percent.

There's probably something on the order of fourteen thousand miles. Remember it, but it's in a three-dimensional maze, so it's crisscrossing on top of many levels. This doesn't show the whole thing. There's a bunch down here, but what we have is only under two hundred miles. Is underneath four square miles, so it's not going to Chicago or anything like that.

But, and then this one's a little puzzling. But if you think that when that canyon incised, it might have originally gone right up this way. And it would just be a little bit better correlation. But then as it made the final incision, it was just a little bit off of that most minimal area. Here's the best example though. Big passage. Very mazy. One single crawl way to get from this to this. And here we've got two, kind of three, but big mazy, hardly anything, big mazy. So it's actually pretty obvious that the cave is somehow related to the drainages. It didn't form independently of the drainages, and then they came randomly. If they truly come randomly, it'd come like through here. Then you'd have dozens, maybe hundreds of openings.

And then this is actually very common in the whole Black Hills. Even some of the small caves only have a single entrance. And most of them were too small for people. They weren't the big entrances like you find in the southeast US.

Why is that? There's something that's unique to the Black Hills, but not in… Jewel Cave is just part of that.

The cave is related to the topography, and almost certainly the topography, the streams, the water flow, these drainages had something to do with how and where the cave formed.

That makes sense.

I always try to make science be a kind of a slam dunk thing rather than overloading it with complicated concepts. I mean, there's value to some of these more complicated concepts, but I really believe most of what we need to know can be discerned just by looking at the basic kind of irrefutable concepts.

Can you show us on that map, if you go back, with what will we be hiking at two forty five?

The Canyons Trail?

Oh, Duh. Scenic Tour is right in here.

OK, half mile.

Yeah. OK, now I actually probably have a better drawing, but the point of all of this is to show that all the limestone layers are dipping down this way. And it forms a bowl shape. So that's what the limestone is doing. Well, look at the whole cave is forming in a bowl shape, and it's tilting down toward the center of the bowl. So that shows us that the cave is related to the modern-day structure or shape of the folding of the layers. And it couldn't have formed three hundred million years ago when everything was just flat. So a relationship with today's geology could not have been created before today's rocks existed. Make sense?

So this is starting to point to a little bit more recent time of origin for the cave, not the original hundred million year ago.

Think one of my favorite ones is this one. Think of this as a layer cake.

Well, just think of it as a cake. Think of this as the cake. This is the rocks that the cave is formed in.

This is the frosting.

This is the the cake pan, because it's been bubbled up and everything's been eroded away.

So this is where we expect to find all the caves, is here, never here, 'cause there's nothing soluble to make the caves.

And then this other stuff rests on top. Now, at one time all of this went all the way across. It was just flat layers, and it was the uplifting that caused things to erode from the center out to this point. But here's the curious. Look at where all the big caves are. Jewel Cave is right on the edge of that, right on the edge of where the frosting is eroded away. SMG Cave, Reeds Cave, Wind Cave, right on the edge. And when you look at the hundreds of caves that are out here. None of them is more than three hundred feet long.

There's no evidence of a hundred mile caves that used to be out here. That shows us that basically this cap is somehow responsible for the big caves. At one point this was over the top, but we don't find remnants of big caves, so that tells us the caves didn't form until the erosion brought this to today's configuration.

So with thinking that we've only found three percent of these caves, is it possible that all of those are all connected? Or not necessarily.

There is a potential for them to connect.

Umm, one of my previous assistants and I used USGS data for the rock layers and elevations of the rock layers and elevations of the water table, and we found, and whether there were any big faults, I could cut it off. And we found that there was nothing to keep Jewel Cave and Wind Cave from connecting.

How many miles is it? About forty miles away?

Twenty.

Twenty miles.

Twenty miles.

So I don't have the drawing. We basically, this is one boundary of a crescent, which is as far Jewel cave can go that way or any other caves. Then there was another one that comes down this way, which is where the tilting layers go beneath the water table. Now you can have cave beneath water table as far as air-filled caves. And there's so much volume that when the pressure drops one percent, the air in The Cave expands one percent, and it blows out tremendous amounts of air. When the pressure comes up, it blows it in. The amount of air is going to be proportional to the pressure change, but also proportional to the total volume of air.

So we were using that total volume of predicted area. We found that all passages in all caves stay in the upper two hundred fifty feet of the limestone. So now we can further narrow the control area, the potential area volume even. And we found that using a volume estimates and these other constraints, and even the fact that passages here are much more honeycomb-like, so one hundred miles here only goes that far. One hundred here goes forty, sixty percent further. So we even allowed for the differences in the the cave density, if you will.

What do the blowholes tell? Are those potential undiscovered caves?

The blowholes? Yes, they somehow connect to voids underground. So we put that all together and we figured out using the total volume of available limestone after we've constrained it, and then the total volume predicted by what's been surveyed so far. that what's been surveyed so far would be three percent. And it would be enough for these two to connect.

If it was only ten percent of what was needed. And the volume predicted here could only go this far. And the volume predicted here could only go this far, that we could definitively say this probably can't. But it turned out to be almost just by coincidence. Did not bias the information. It turned out to be about what it would take. Now the only thing is, again with a diagram that I don't have for this talk.

Once rainwater goes in start moving away from the hills and gets. Then it takes on kind of a regional trend, and it goes circumferentially down this way. And over here it comes circumferentially around the hills to this. So down here in the hot in the… Well, it's a Hot Springs area, but there's also a particular spring. It's where the underground flow converges, but there's no net movement from one side to the other.

So it can be the opposite of a surface water divide where it can go right up to both sides of the mountain range, but they don't connect. You just to be kind of the opposite because things are coming to, but never cross.

So the answer to that question is there's enough volume that they could. There's a little bit of reason to think that don't, but it's going to take a whole different kind of study to figure out if that's true and or exploration. But with it’s taken forty, fifty, well, almost sixty yeah, sixty years to get that much mapped, and we've only gotten a couple miles closer. So we're talking generations.

Is this continuing?

Yes.

Yep, it was discovered in nineteen hundred.

Not much was done until nineteen fifty-nine, and then a couple named Herb and Jan Conn, who were climbers, were invited to go caving at Jewel Cave and fell in love with it. And they kept doing it for twenty years and discovered sixty miles. Then they turned it over to me and a friend of mine, and for thirty years I found I was responsible for the next seventy miles. And now I've turned it over to our trip leaders. Multiple trip leaders and their responsible for, I don't know if all my numbers add up, something like forty or fifty miles.

So yes, it will continue.

OK, this part here is called the minnelusa formation but when we looked at it carefully, we found that it had very distinct subunits. There's a cross-bedded sandstone, which is really important. There's a thin-bedded limestone. There's a sandstone with a limestone cap, but more importantly, it's got a thick layer of shale at the base. And then there are sandstone, dolomite, dolastones, dolomite, various sandstones, a braciated unit, and we've got a pretty precise thickness. It does not vary significantly at all, and so instead of a big four or five hundred foot thickness, which is really hard to map, we've got distinctly different things, and we can look at them, and we can trace out where this is cut through to expose this. And by doing that, creating a geologic map, we can derive where things are folded and where they are found. And we get a whole lot more understanding of what's going on.

So this is what we end up with. This is the Jewel Cave fault. You actually drove along the down-through side of the Jewel Cave fault if you came from the well, you come from the east. And then as it comes over here to the west, it splinters into smaller faults and then crosses Hell Canyon. And then this, they all kind of dissipate. All the, and then up over here we don't have any significant cave. The cave stays in the upper two fifty feet. It pinches off or gets really small where it crosses beneath canyons, so that's kind of what we're looking at.

Most importantly, we have a very permeable sandstone here. In the bottom of this blue has shale on top of it. This is the Englewood limestone, and even though there aren't cave passages down here, the bottom of it has shale.

We get our water from down here, and when we drill a well, the water rises a hundred feet, so it's under pressure, and that shale is impermeable enough to keep it under pressure. So that gives me a lot of confidence that shale keeps water from going through.

Also, there's less than one percent of there's like one quarter of one percent of the known cave has any water, dripping water in it, or even evidence of past dripping water. Or it might have dripped and, you know, dried out. That basically means that rainwater is not the source of the water that made the cave, which is the commonly—that's the base level of, that's the starting point for almost all of theories of how the cave form. Either it came down from rainfall or it came from below, hydrothermal, from below. Well, we've got shale that would keep it from that. It is still keeping water from coming up from above and no passages down there anyway. And the only place where we have dripping water is where that shale has been cut through.

So if there was water seeping into the cracks to make the cave in the first place, some of those conduits would still be available to leak rainwater in today. But it's not there it's not quite a hundred percent relationship, but it's ninety-nine point seventy-five percent relationship.

So, summarizing everything, several feet of shale at the base of the underlying minnelusa subunit 3, several feet of shale at the base of the underlying Englewood overlying, so, you can't have water from above and you can't have water coming in from below to make the cave. Less than a quarter percent of the cave shows any evidence of that. A dripping, basically dripping through a rock that is not saturated with water, and there's been no uplift structure, or basically what this is saying is, the way the cave is laid out is based on the structure. The uplifting and structure that has most recently happened. You know, instead of three hundred million years ago, the evidence says more like thirty millions. It’s an order of magnitude newer, and it corresponds with today's features, a structure, the contacts, the exposed rocks and so on.

Do you think it happened more recently than like the Black Hills uplifts?

It did happen after the Black Hills uplift.

OK.

Umm, but that puts it at the most thirty million years ago. Well let me think. Sixty to oh, OK. So the uplift, according to the literature, says sixty to thirty. This happened newer than thirty, and there's other reasons why we get to that, but it didn't.

The dinosaurs are older than this cave.

So, if we don't believe that it happened from water above or water below?

That's what I want. I'm glad that you asked. Well, it was a mass transfer system I learned that in chemical engineer. To make a limestone cave, you can't have just water going into a crack and sitting there and making that bigger. That water can only dissolve a little teeny bit. Then it has to be moved away. There's got to a way to keep moving fresh water, not fresh water, but water that hasn't dissolved anything. To you have to move it away, 'cause you've got to transfer that mass out of that crack to make it bigger. And almost every theory that I've examined doesn't allow for that. They don't say water just goes in, and sits there, but they don't really address what is the actual mechanism.

Here's what we need. We need to have a rock to dissolve. We need to have something to dissolve the rock, and it's well known that carbonic acid will dissolve limestone. It’s a weak acid. It might take a long time. You need a transport medium, that is also the water. Something to keep moving the dissolved stuff out, and you need end points. You need a recharge area and a discharge area, and they've got to be aligned in a reasonable way or just it all falls apart. It just doesn't work. You can't just make this stuff up. You got to map and see is the proposed recharge area uphill from the discharge area, and then you need a continuous flow path. In other words, even with, you know, limestone itself is not very permeable.

So in geology, we talked about secondary permeability. That's the limestone fractured and now that you provide that. But the fractures have to be continuous. If it's fractures, it has to be continuous from the recharge to the discharge, or nothing's going to happen. That's always been the stumbling or the hard part. But the fact that we have the very permeable sandstone sitting on top of the less than permeable initial state of the limestone, that gives the water a path to go through.

And so here's the Jewel Cave, the very simplified version of the Jewel Cave fault and this incline in in Hell Canyon. And these are, mostly, these are different subunits of the minnelusa . But here in Pass Creek, they've eroded down to expose that permeable sandstone. And up here in Teepee Canyon, same thing. Look at the elevations, fifty five hundred, fifty seven hundred. Water can. When there was active stream, in right now neither canyon has active streams. But when there was an active stream, water could seep into that permeable sandstone.

Nothing's going to happen unless you have a lower elevation for that to now move down to and then discharge down in Lithograph Canyon and Hell Canyon. And now all of a sudden, got a way to put water in the system. That’s the recharge and to let it. We got a pathway and any water running down this, either of these streams, will, some of it's going to leak out and go downhill and discharge into the streams that were there in Hell Canyon and Lithograph Canyon at the time, and it's just gravity fed.

Now, this is what I'm going to show you next is, you know, it's not a perfect proof of anything, but it's a very convenient observation. That's where the cave is. The cave is right there between this recharge and these discharge areas. There's very likely cave up here. That’s the problem. We don't know what we haven't discovered yet. But as a first point of observation, we have at least a partial confirmation of this idea, so it's pretty intriguing.

So Mike, if you look at that slide right there, right under the middle, like at twelve o'clock, the fifty four hundred on the X on the red.

Yeah.

So if you go down to the last little fingers of the Cave that you see right below that.

Yeah.

Like, when you get to the end of that is just a solid wall?

That's where there are complications and I can't go into, my easily, go into my general. But right here, there's a monocline and the monocline is where the rock is dipping this way, but at the monocline it dips more steeply. So, you can have extensional breakage and then things in the rocks will collapse down in there.

OK.

When you're down in there, you can see there's been dissolving between those rocks. So it happened when the cave was still forming. For me and then there's calcite spar that formed at the end of the development of the cave, and that kind of closed up those openings. It’s coating of spar that cemented them together and closed it.

When we were there, we have strong air flow. And if we're, if the cave is blowing out that day and you come out here and it's still in your face, that means that's where the rest of the cave is. If it was actually blowing the other way, then you might think that there are entrances. It's escaping this way and then going out those entrances. But if you are there and you still feel it in your face, that means most of the cave is out here. It’s just that it's not easy to cross.

And that's true. I mean, not specifically because of faults, but there are fault lines through here. There's only, if it only connects here and here. Not even here. And it's a virtual straight line. So, and I can draw several of those straight lines, and I can see there are places where the cave, where something's trying to block it off or keep it from happening. But you can find that one hole, you can get right on by. And this one here, when you look at, zoom in, there's just one place where you cross from this through this, and it's obviously a fault.

So it's a matter of still pushing out here until you find the one thing that comes through. Possibly you won't, that, but maybe some of these things will come out here and then you'll get past. OK. Fill in the picture a bit?

That is a line. I'm going to show you a cross section on that line from A to A prime. That's the yellow line. And this is a diagram of uh. This is actual data. I didn't just randomly draw these in. This is taking the data and looking at it as a cross section, and you can see how it seems to pinch off as it approaches this canyon.

This is a little bit not complete because there could be passages that come farther, and you know, make that a little bit more of a solid relationship. But over there, that's what's really happening. There's no guesswork there. The Cave gets down to two hundred and fifty feet below the top. But it thins out, the thickness of the cave system thins out and rises where it approaches the canyons. And again, this pattern is true throughout the Black Hills. Even some pretty small caves.

So putting this all together, this would be the Pass Creek area with a stream in it. This would be the Hell Canyon area with a stream in it. And umm, these would be fractures. This part here is just the pattern to show you that it's limestone, but these are the fractures. Here is the bounding shale below. There's a real solid layer of shale up here, and then there's a layer that thins, thickens, and thins. Sometimes, it's almost nothing, but the total thickness is always forty feet. So but we have water that keeps it from coming from above it, and we have obstructions that keep water that is going to come into this sandstone from these are going up here. And we had the initial limestone that is not very permeable and not continuous, you know, completely continuous in its fractures. I'm going to show you how valuable that sandstone will be to actually make the cave work. So, here both have cut. This is cut down into the sandstone. That is cut down into the sandstone. And now gravity is just going to allow this stream to leak into the sandstone, which is initially more permeable than the fractures, into that stream. That will, this will be a losing stream and that will be a gaining stream. And now you've got your pathway. Now you've got your way to dissolve limestone and carry it away and make the cave bigger.

And all the other things like. And when you're in this confined aquifer situation, water can come down and then go back up as long as the output is lower than the input. That's just a hydrological... People know that happens.

And are those just normal erosion events? Like allowing the water to reach?

Uh yes. Well, whatever, basically whatever erosion events made Hell Canyon a steep canyon. See, remember the original one was kind of a broad drainage. And sometimes we can find. Well. No. No, that'll. I'm not at a place where I can tell you that 'cause it'll get confusing. But so what's happening is now it's starting to incise, and once it breaches the shales and is in direct contact with that again, the Samsung's going to take most of it, and even though it's like impermeable or it's permeable little connections between the sand grains, and it's only forty feet thick, there's actually more volume there than there is in the cave today.

Sure, the passages are big, can hold huge volumes, and sure, the cave looks complex, but it's still, it's still not enough volume to even equal what this is. So that's a little counterintuitive, but I've kind of worked through the math to do that. So it's making those passages bigger. And this is pretty much like quartz sandstone. It's not much, it's not getting dissolved away or anything, but this is limestone and it is getting dissolved away.

But as time goes on, this gets bigger because it's being dissolved away and the different sections begin to coalesce, and we get some degree of continuity now, and this is going to take most the water. But you still need this so that you have an output. And see how this has cut down more deeply. And you also have some of this sandstone collapsing down into the cave and that's the paleofill. If you believe that the cave formed three hundred million years ago, then you would believe that the cave was already there through some different set of events. The Minnelusa Sea came in, and it filled in that cave, and then the cave as we know it today was kind of re-exhumed. But when you actually look at these, this, we, we don't see the remnants of an old cave. If we, if I went down the, a cave passage and I saw kind of like a partial opening all blocked with red. And there was one on the other. And maybe that passage forks, so I could go to the parallel passage and see the continuity of that old original cave, then I'd say textbook example.

Well, I've been in three quarters of this cave. I've never seen a textbook example yet. So, it looks to me like this stuff is simply collapsing from here, and it's just sitting in place, and whenever I give my talks, I call it neofill. Paleo means old, neo means new, and if we're talking about the difference between thirty million years or less, versus three hundred million years, that's an order of magnitude. A legitimate difference to say, to coin that idea of neofill. Sure, it's cavefill but geologically, it's got to be newer.

Yeah.

About that actually, so with. Is that also like part of the minnelusa formation? Would that also be accurate to say that?

Yeah.

So are those sediments, they were kind of deposited like one million years ago?

They weren't deposited long ago. Either way, it's coming from the minnelusa. The question is, was it coming in by depositing into sinkholes of an already existing cave, or is it coming in when this cave forms up against it? And all the—there's way more evidence. But all the evidence seems to indicate it's concurrent. The fill is collapsing in as the cave is forming.

So sediments themselves are still old, but its neofill because it's like new?

Yes, yes, It's the same sediments and it's the same age, but as far as being incorporated in the cave, it's very different. That makes sense?

And then once, this could involve climate changes and things, I'm just taking the simplest approach first. By the time that this cuts all the way through the sandstone, now there's nothing to hold the water back, you know, to contain it. So this drains out and it dries. When it was connected with an aquifer above, it flowed very well. But now that we don't have that thing to provide the continuity, this, in the big picture, is still not very connected. We've removed the weight of the water from up here. That reduces the pressure in the water here, and that allows carbon dioxide to degas. I didn't mention earlier, but basically we start with the assumption that the water had picked up carbon dioxide from the soils and that made it a weak carbonic acid. But it's like soda pop. You open the can and once you've released the constraint, it just bubbles off because that dissolved carbon dioxide doesn't want to stay dissolved. It wants to get out. So you've given it a way to get out. Now this is no longer able to retain even what it had already dissolved. So the dissolved limestone that's in there starts to precipitate in a pretty much standing still body of water, and that's what gives us the calcite spar that the cave is famous for. So that spar is really the termination of the development of the cave. And then it drains, I have the idea, but I haven't developed it completely.

These cracks always were able to maybe leak water on down. We don't have any place where we can see what it does at the top of this, so I am assuming that it's still, but it's way less than the water that was moving over this way. Just—and so the cave would be slowly draining out that way, doing whatever it's going to do. Maybe it gets to the top of the shale and goes downhill and then comes out of springs far away. But without that water in there, which provided buoyancy, it will support about forty percent of the weight of limestone. I learned something like this when I was a kid at the lake: you start picking up a big rock, it feels this heavy. As soon as you get it up, in the air, it feels sixty—or forty percent heavier. So these are just basic concepts there's lots of details to be worked out, but this works and it puts it in a real-world context. It's one thing to have a theory, but does your geology here at Pass Creek and down in Hell Canyon and having these layers actually make it work? They do. Everything has fit together well without any—without forcing it. Do you think there was some sort of event that would have caused all the water to drain rather than stay full of water over time? Once this is cut through, I think not. Because there's just nothing when the water levels up here—there was to hold back so it could stay full. This all could be in conjunction with climate changes and things like that. But again, I'm trying to take the simplest, most obvious approach first, and this is called Occam's razor.

Philosophically, always choose the simplest explanation and don't make it more complicated unless the evidence forces you to. Because if you start by trying dozens of different possibilities it's so easy to read something in there, it just becomes more guesswork. Keep it as simple as possible. But then, when the evidence forces you, you make it… and don't adapt it until the evidence forces you to.

So my guess, and I guess I'm asking because there is no longer evidence of water entering anywhere… Are there no stalactites or stalagmites in this cave?

There are in that one quarter of one percent that I mentioned, yeah. Where? I don't have a very clear picture here. Basically, primarily this shale is breached. That's where we would get dripping water. And so it's always like on the edge of the canyons and in a couple places where there is obviously some faulting that has reached the shale, but it's really compelling. If I showed you all drip sites in the cave and corresponded with the breaching of that shale, it's very compelling. So that's what you were asking. Once that side dries up and there's nothing to hold the water in, you think then just kind of naturally drained out?

Yeah, yeah.

Just worked its way down through.

So either went out or down.

Yeah. No, it is. This isn't the best diagram for this, but I have another presentation where the rainwater does come down through these sandstones, then it gets intercepted by the shale. And so today, all of the springs for miles and miles around that we have are coming off the top of shale where it's exposed. I mean, I only discovered this last year that every single one of them—you know, I haven't mapped out the whole extent, but for miles and miles, every single spring is coming off of this shale.

Remember I talked about the monocline? These are blocks of sandstone in the cave that have come down at that monocline line, so that monocline kind of broke things enough for stuff to fall through, down in the cave. And it's already solid rock. It’s cross bedded it looks identical to rock that you see in road cuts on the west side of Hell Canyon. That meant it was already there and it had already become rock before it went into the caves. And it's way different than if the cave already existed and then sea is just sending sediments down. See how that would be. So this is more evidence that this is on the newer end of geology. Right after they redid the, they slightly widened the road, this was a fresh cut. Still not there yet. It's harder to see now, but we can see that this is a collapse. So basically the cave was forming and it was allowing things to collapse, then higher things collapsed, and then the farther up you go, the less room there is to collapse into. So, it's hard to tell here whether it ever made it to the surface, but this is basically a sinkhole forming. Because the minnelusa was collapsing into the cave. When they were redoing the road, they broke into this. This is all sandstone. I went in, very unstable sandstone, I went in. I mapped it and then they filled it with concrete because it's a danger, but also it kind of curved around and went underneath the road. And if water started rushing on there and undercut stuff in the road, that would be… But see this? Just the very top of that collapse, just a few feet remained, and any more collapse would basically fill it completely because broken rock takes up more space than solid rock.

No, I don't want it. It's almost… well, we still have a little bit of time. So I'm going back to this. And I'm… I think I'm gonna look at… Yeah, okay. How did I say this? There is no point lower than this that water can come out. It has to go downhill to there, so I just kind of did an outline of these cave passages. Because by knowing how much area or exposure, this is how that controls how much water can go in at any given time. But what's going on here is going to control how much water can come out. So really, there's your recharge, your discharge. The narrower discharge is going to constrain the amount of water that can form. I'm going to try to predict how fast it can form. I'm going to assume that we've got another hundred and fifty miles up here, give it the benefit of the doubt that has to be dissolved as we're forming the cave I can't just pick what we know. So I'm going to assume that it's everywhere in here, to be fair to this assessment of how long it would take for the cave to form.

Oh, I thought I took this out. We're not going to go into this right now. Oh. I think I took out something that I did not want to take out. Yeah, I took out the wrong thing.

If you just explain a little bit.

Okay. So this ends up being a… what do you call that shape?

No, it's four-sided. This kind of like a trapezoidal thing. You could draw it in three dimensions, can apply a hydrologic formula to it. The amount of water that's going to flow over any given amount of time is going to be dependent on the permeability of the rock. It's dependent on the elevation difference. The steeper it is, the faster it will go, and it's going to be constrained by the area where it can come out at that narrow end. And based on that, I was able to calculate… then I had another diagram that would tell me, making some basic assumptions of temperature and pressure… and we look at this, this is all happening in recent geology. So there's really no likelihood that this formed when it was a thousand feet underground. So I could make assumptions about the temperature in particular and estimate the amount of limestone that would be dissolved per liter. And then I took the number of liters for all of this, plus the assumed amount, and divided it into it and got a time that would be just a minimum amount, basic assumption estimate of what it would take to dissolve out that cave.

150 million years?

1.1 million years. No monkeying with the data or anything. That was an eye opener. So it would only take that. We have one radiometric date on the spar. Remember, the spar was coming like the termination of cave development, because now all the water is gone. So, it can't… It's not coming, it's not going to make more spar. So that's been dated at about eleven million years. So, the cave could have stopped forming eleven million years ago and started forming only a million years before that. So that makes it geologically very recent. There are lots of other things, three or four more talks to support this idea, and I apologize, I deleted the wrong slides. Yeah, this is complicated. Basically all that… what it says is this method of dissolving out the cave would be much more effective than where it's coming through this blanket and doing this, than most of the traditional guesses of how fast it would dissolve. But it's too complicated for this talk.

So the question is, since carbon dioxide is the thing that makes it acidic, is there enough carbon dioxide to make this happen? And perhaps if microbes entering the sandstone aquifer encounter a food source like organic carbon in shale and clay layers, basically, they metabolize the shale and they convert it to carbon dioxide. That's one of the biggest problems with the whole carbon dioxide thing. If it's coming from soils, then why? Then it should be most acidic here and it should just pinch off as it goes in. Jewel Cave is big and small and big and small. But so, is there enough carbon dioxide to make it happen this way? And the answer is, we could be generating way more carbon dioxide than we would ever get right at the surface by the microbes metabolizing the free carbon in the shales and just saturating this whole thing with carbon dioxide. And that way you can get it way down underneath and still strong enough to make big passages.

I remember reading somewhere that the different colors, we see in the cave are from decaying plant material and stuff like that. No, I'm pretty sure. I do know that there have been studies on some of the coloring. A lot of times, like stalactites will be red because there's iron, but there are times when organic acids, not actual material, but organic acids, can cause the same coloration and vice versa. Just because it has something in there doesn't mean it's necessarily going to be that color.

It's a little more complicated than that, and we're getting into fine degrees of geochemistry that I don't think anyone has sorted out to this point. More of you take samples, you test, and then you see that this is either from that or from the other thing. It's not good enough that you can actually predict.

I asked that question of Hazel Barton and Penny Boston. Hazel Barton is a well-known caver who has gotten very deep into studying extremophiles, especially microbes. They have very unusual qualities that were unexpected. Penny Boston was a caver and a geologist, and I don't know if she still is, but for a time she was head of NASA's exobiology program, trying to figure out what you would need to decide whether there was life on Mars. So these are people that know what they're talking about. It's not a big scientific… you know, they're just… I'm just asking them, is this a possibility or is it completely not possible? And remember, here's our shale that is right there between the top of the—well, there's shale up here, but there's also shale right here. The sandstone at one time was an aquifer and it had this intermittent shale in here, so it was in intimate contact with shale. And then… Hazel said: "Microorganisms change the local geochemistry and can dramatically accelerate speleogenesis and even lead to cave formation in geochemical environments that would otherwise not be conducive to dissolution." Like a quartzite sand cave, which is not eroded out, it's been dissolved out. Quartz does not normally dissolve, but those microbes catalyze it. OK. I got a little technical, but I think you would pretty much getting the idea?

I have a question, in the years that you've been working on this, and those predecessors that were working on it, have there been any earthquakes in this area that can affect the caves? Would an earthquake affect the cave?

Well, I mean, at one point with all the fracturing and the faulting, during the uplift of the hills, and maybe in the aftermath of that in many years past—eons past—yes. Today, I've been in the cave and also in Wind Cave, and when there were earthquakes… what happens is, though, somehow that earthquake, I believe, is setting up low, low, low frequency—you barely hear it. It's setting up pulses in the cave air, and you can hear it.

There's a place where we were surveying, and I thought I heard something for a couple of seconds, but I thought it was my imagination like a low rumble. And just as I spoke up, we all spoke up at the same time and said, "Did you hear that?" OK. And then we were like, wild speculation—did something collapse, or would we feel a surge of air? Would there be dust? We trapped… nothing. We came out. Everything is fine.

At the time, the School of Mines had a seismograph, and we verified with them that there was a tremor—a four-point-something tremor—halfway between here and somewhere near Igloo. Down there, down south, and it was that exact same time. Wow. No one felt it on the surface either. So today, there hasn’t been anything for a long time, and for thousands of years at least, there hasn't been anything that would make any difference.

Learn how Jewel Cave formed and what makes the cave so unique with Ranger Mike!

Geology, Caves, and Resource Management

Transcript

Discovery Hour Transcript- Sydney Hansen 12/13/2024 Musical Intro Hello and Welcome to Jewel Cave National Monument’s 125 Years of Discovery podcast, Discovery Hour. Join us this episode as we listen to an introduction to geology from the park’s Physical Science technician Sydney Hansen- recorded on December 13th, 2024. A transcript of this podcast is available on our website www.nps.gov/jeca. Thank you for listening! Interlude

Transcript 00:00:00 Today I'm going to be presenting to you all about geology, caves and kind of what resource management does here at Jewel Cave, along the lines of, you know, cave management. 00:00:09 And I am Sydney Hansen, and I'm the physical science technician here. 00:00:13 I just started in June, but here we are. 00:00:15 A good time. 00:00:18 And I am the first speaker in the guest speaker series for Discovery. 00:00:23 There's a hundred twenty five years of discovery this year, and so to kick it off, we're going to do one speaker every month where someone 00:00:29 Comes in and gives a presentation something related to Jewel Cave or Science, so stay tuned if you're interested in this series, it'll be another one next month. 00:00:38 Don't know if we have an exact date yet. 00:00:40 We're gonna kind of start off with a little overview of basic geology because I don't expect everyone in this room to be geologists. 00:00:46 It's kind of unrealistic 00:00:47 So I love audience participation. 00:00:50 So I will be asking for a lot of participation. 00:00:52 So does anyone know what exactly the study of geology is or want to take a guess? 00:01:00 The study of rocks? 00:01:01 I was really hoping someone was gonna say that because it's not actually the study of rocks. 00:01:06 More or less it’s the study of Earth, the study of Earths structures, substances and the processes that act on the Earth. 00:01:14 So it's way broader than just the study of rocks. 00:01:18 But thank you for answering. 00:01:20 Rocks are part of it though. 00:01:21 Yes. 00:01:23 So there are three main rock types, and I'll go over each one of these and then the main rock type of jewel cave. Well, that one is sedimentary rocks. 00:01:32 So our first type, we have actually all three types of rocks here in the Black Hills, which is kind of fun because it doesn't happen everywhere like where I'm from in Ohio, all we have are Sed rocks. 00:01:41 Not very exciting. 00:01:42 But here we have all three, which is awesome. 00:01:45 So here in this first picture up on the left, the top left we have a picture of Jewel Cave. 00:01:50 It's basically a bunch of layers of sediments and this is a particularly fun area because it's called geologist delight and a lot of geologists just love to stop and look at it because there's a lot going on here geology wise. 00:02:00 You've got the layers that are stacked on top of each other. 00:02:03 So when sedimentary rocks get deposited, 00:02:05 Usually they're deposited flat on top of each other. 00:02:08 And different forces acting on the rocks is what causes them to become folded and faulted. 00:02:11 And so in this picture you have basically you can kind of see the layers of the rocks, but you can also see that there are some weird forces acting on them because they're not entirely flat, which is awesome. 00:02:21 And then in this other picture you have the Badlands. 00:02:23 A pretty characteristic example of sedimentary rocks. 00:02:26 A lot of fossils there. 00:02:28 Eroding away pretty quickly. 00:02:29 Most of the time they're not super resistant as far as rock types 00:02:32 Go and then. 00:02:34 Top right, you have the textbook picture of sedimentary rocks. 00:02:36 You open a book about sedimentology, you're going to see the Wave. 00:02:40 Just the textbook picture. 00:02:42 Its actually Lithified sand dunes. 00:02:43 So most people think of sand dunes as loose sand grains floating around everywhere, if they were to actually be a Hard Rock, that's what it would look like. 00:02:53 The next rock type that we have are igneous rocks. Umm, so up in this picture here you can see that we've got the Cathedral Spires out at the Black Hills and Custer State Park. 00:03:03 Typically you're igneous rocks are going to be super resistant and so that's why they stick up out of the ground so much. 00:03:09 And the rest of the ground is more flat. 00:03:11 So these are typically the rocks that make up your mountains. They're going to be the more resistant rocks that you see forming all these high areas. And then you've also got your volcanic rocks. 00:03:20 So anytime you see volcanoes or volcanic rock, that's also an igneous rock. Igneous rocks form when you've got kind of magma or lava. 00:03:28 Any type of like molten 00:03:29 rock and when it solidifies, that becomes an igneous rock. They can be extrusive or intrusive, meaning that they can form outside the Earth 's crust or inside the 00:03:37 Earth’s 00:03:37 Crust in the case of our cathedral Spires. 00:03:41 They formed inside the earth and eventually 00:03:44 When the Rocky Mountains started uplifting, it caused uplift here and the igneous rocks that were inside the earth started rising up higher and higher and solidified. 00:03:52 That's kind of what gave us our cathedral Spires, which is kind of cool. 00:03:56 And then the third and final type of rock that we have, our metamorphic rocks, this picture on the far left is actually an example of what we have here in Custer. 00:04:04 Was taken off the Mickelson Trail. It's. 00:04:07 It's called schist. It has a lot of different shiny minerals in it, so a lot of times your super, super shiny kind of smooth looking rocks are 00:04:13 Going to be your metamorphic rocks. 00:04:15 And these typically form under heat and pressure without becoming molten. 00:04:18 Anytime a rock becomes molten, that's when it becomes igneous. 00:04:21 Before it reaches that molten phase is when it's metamorphic. 00:04:25 It's characteristic because, you know, if you have sedimentary rocks that get buried super deep and then it gets really warm. Those minerals that make up these rocks become unstable and so they'll change their composition and become all new minerals, creating your metamorphic rocks. And so a lot of the 00:04:39 Minerals you'll see in these rocks only form in metamorphic rocks because they have to change in order to become stable in whatever state that they're forming in. 00:04:46 These are my personal favorite ones. 00:04:48 Don’t Tell Jewel Cave. 00:04:49 I really like metamorphic rocks. 00:04:50 I think they're pretty and I think their colors are fun. Like you can have red minerals and blue minerals and green minerals. Sedimentary rocks aren't that colorful. I don't know. 00:04:59 I think they're pretty. 00:05:01 So sometimes with metamorphic rocks, the grains will align so they can get compressed. 00:05:05 And then a lot of times the grains will align to form with that compression compressional. 00:05:10 Force and so another example of a metamorphic rock would be you're gniess, which is typically known to be banded. 00:05:17 And so it's this is the one on the right, is a schist, but it kind of has that kind of like, gneissic, like looking banding to it, which basically just means it was compressed so much that the minerals aligned into these special looking lines. 00:05:30 And then if anyone has a birthstone or a birthday in January, the red mineral garnet is your your birth stone. 00:05:37 You got a metamorphic rock mineral. 00:05:42 So in geology, we talked about how it's very broad. 00:05:45 It's the study of Earth, not necessarily like the study of rocks. Within geology 00:05:48 There are thirty seven sub disciplines and I'm not going to talk about all thirty seven of these, but these are basically where you get more specific. 00:05:56 Are you going to study water? 00:05:57 You going to study rocks? 00:05:58 You going to study? 00:05:59 Formations. That's kind of where these thirty seven sub disciplines come into play and I'll touch on a few of them. Definitely not all of them. 00:06:05 That's a lot of disciplines. 00:06:08 So the first one petrology, does anyone want to guess what the study of petrology is? 00:06:13 Study of rocks. 00:06:14 Kind of yes. 00:06:15 So petrology is actually the study of Rocks. 00:06:19 Not geology, but petrology. 00:06:21 So when you study petrology, you're studying rocks, their formations, what makes them up 00:06:26 You study a lot of like a lot of times, you'll actually cut rocks down and you'll like, look at them under a microscope and figure out what makes up these rocks, their characteristics. 00:06:34 So petrology is actually the study of rocks. 00:06:36 It's a fun little trick question that I love asking people. 00:06:42 Geomorphology. Does anyone have any idea what this one is? 00:06:47 Study of rock formations. 00:06:48 That's pretty close. 00:06:49 It's basically the study of Earth’s landscapes. 00:06:52 How they like change, how they form, how they're going to change in the future. 00:06:56 So anytime you're like looking at the Grand Canyon, for example, and you're like, how did that Canyon form, that would be the study of geomorphology? 00:07:03 You're essentially studying how Earth 's landscapes have formed and how they're going to evolve in the future. 00:07:07 If you're looking at a mountain and you're like what’s that going to 00:07:09 Look like in ten million years, that would be a geomorphology study. 00:07:13 So it's basically anytime you're looking at earth landscapes and how they're gonna evolve and form. 00:07:21 Paleontology this one 's easy. 00:07:23 Anyone want to take a gander at this one? 00:07:25 Yeah, the study of ancient life. And fossils so a lot of times when people go into geology, they'll be like, I want to study dinosaurs. And if you want to study dinosaurs, you're going to study paleontology. 00:07:36 There's actually more than just dinosaurs in paleontology. You've got all your little buddies here, like a gastropod. 00:07:42 Got trilobites, You've got little fishy fossils. 00:07:45 The fish fossils are actually from the Green River Formation out in western Wyoming, which is kind of cool. 00:07:49 Sort of pretty. 00:07:50 Local they were actually fun fact. They formed because of the massive Yellowstone eruption. 00:07:56 The ash fell into these lakes and killed all the fish and so 00:07:59 Now. 00:07:59 We have basically Yellowstone fish. 00:08:03 There are fossils in Jewel Cave. 00:08:05 I have a couple slides that talk about like the formation of Jewel Cave and some of the fossils you'll find in this area. But a lot of the stuff you'll find are corals and little like shelly creatures called brachiopods. 00:08:17 They typically form the pahasapa limestone which. 00:08:20 Which indicates that there was a shallow sea. 00:08:23 So you have your corals and your little shelly guys kind of like how if you were to go to the ocean, you'll see the coral reefs and you'll see little snail shells. 00:08:31 More or less kind of what was there when Jewel Cave was an ocean. 00:08:38 So, mineralogy, does anyone want to take a guess about what the study of mineralogy is? 00:08:44 Yeah, the study of minerals, their chemical makeups, their physical properties and just like 00:08:50 How atoms make up everything? 00:08:52 Minerals make up all the rocks, and so you can't have a rock without having minerals 00:08:56 And so when you're studying mineralogy, you're basically studying how the rocks are made, what they're made of, their chemical and physical properties. 00:09:03 This is a pretty intense course if you're a geology major. It's one of the hefty ones. 00:09:08 But yeah, minerals are super pretty 00:09:11 They're like the purest form, and so if you have a rock that is entirely made-up of one mineral, it's not actually rock. It's just a mineral. 00:09:17 So this would be a lot of your birth stones, stuff like that. 00:09:20 Precious gems. 00:09:24 So the study of volcanology. Does anyone want to guess what the study of volcanology is? 00:09:30 Yeah. So volcanology study of volcanoes and volcanism. 00:09:35 Pretty self explanatory 00:09:37 You see a volcano you want to study it, you're going to study volcanology. 00:09:40 You can study the magma flows 00:09:42 You can study the lava tubes, the different types of rocks that come from the volcanoes. 00:09:46 Typically those are basalts. 00:09:48 You're pumices, your scoria. 00:09:50 You've got all sorts of 00:09:52 Tuff. a bunch of different fun rock types that you can only find from volcanoes. 00:09:56 I actually got into geology because I wanted to study volcanoes and then I started school and then I was like, you know what? 00:10:02 I like geomorphology and so, I became a geomorphologist. And then from that started studying caves. 00:10:08 So I was all over the place. 00:10:10 Yes. 00:10:11 That's a pretty popular one in the geology world. 00:10:14 And then hydrology? 00:10:16 Does anyone want to guess what hydrology is? 00:10:21 Yeah. 00:10:22 So it's a study of movement, distribution and properties of water. When I was in my graduate program, I did kind of a combination of stuff. 00:10:30 I did your geomorphology, your hydrology and then I also studied caves, which is I will get to that later. 00:10:37 Can't spoil it, but so the study of hydrology you can do different things 00:10:42 So you can kind of study like the chemical makeup of the water, like what's the pH, the disturbance of the water, kind of what, how 00:10:50 Polluted is the water. 00:10:52 You can also study things like what I was doing where you're 00:10:55 Studying the water depth and the salinity of the water and trying to figure out how that affects the formation of caves so you can do a lot of different stuff with hydrology. That also would include things like your aquifers, your water pollution. 00:11:09 A lot of environmentalists will study hydrology because you know, a lot of people care about the quality of the water we're drinking. And so a lot of people will study hydrology 00:11:16 If they want to go into environmental fields too. 00:11:22 Planetary geology. I think this one might be a bit tough. 00:11:25 Anyone wanna try to guess what this one is? 00:11:30 The study of rocks on other planets and moons. 00:11:32 Yeah, more or less, yeah. Geology of celestial bodies 00:11:35 So you can study the geology on planets, stars, moons, anything in outer space. Really. 00:11:41 Obviously we can't go to space. 00:11:43 Well, I mean we can, but we can't really. 00:11:46 We can't really go to Saturn and study Saturn, so a lot of the stuff that you do with planetary geology, you actually study from microscopes and super powerful cameras. 00:11:55 If you wanted to study like the Moon or Mars, we have Rovers on there that can like bring back rocks and you can do chemical analyses. 00:12:00 That, but a lot of what you do isn't actually obviously in outer space. You have to do it here on Earth. 00:12:07 But it's still really interesting 00:12:09 It's a fun little thing to touch on because I think. 00:12:11 It's a different type of geology because it's not something everyone does and it honestly is really complicated. 00:12:16 I think it's pretty cool 00:12:17 To give this one a shout out. 00:12:20 And then the study of speleology. 00:12:22 Does anyone want to guess what the study of speleology is? 00:12:28 Closer. 00:12:31 Formations. 00:12:32 Close. It's the study of caves and karst features 00:12:36 So you're studying (…..??? Not sure exactly what I said here but I don’t think the transcript was right) the karst features part of that. But yeah, so overall the study of The Cave. 00:12:42 We do a lot of that here cuz. 00:12:43 You know right 00:12:44 Below us is a giant cave. 00:12:48 Yeah. 00:12:48 But yeah, so with that, I'm going to segway into the caves part of the talk and we're going to start talking about Jewel Cave and different types of caves. 00:12:57 So in caves we have a lot of different formations. 00:13:00 These are called speleothems and so you'll hear a lot of people that study caves and say, oh, yeah, we're going to go do some sort of test on this speleothem 00:13:07 When we say speleothems, we're basically just talking about some sort of cave 00:13:10 Feature and I'm going to kind of go through the different ones that we have in Jewel Cave specifically. 00:13:15 So if you haven't taken a tour yet and you're going to, this is one that you're going to see on the scenic route. If that's where you decide to go. This is our cave bacon. 00:13:23 You'll notice that a lot of cavers decide to name things after food 00:13:27 I'm not entirely sure why, but there's a lot of stuff in there named after food. 00:13:30 So cave Bacon is a type of drapery that forms essentially when water is dripping down the wall and it distributes that calcite and it kind of just forms like this fun little flowy fashion. 00:13:40 And when 00:13:40 Lit up. It looks like a piece of bacon. 00:13:43 So then we also have a lot of formations that are made with a really delicate mineral called gypsum. 00:13:48 If you touch it, it's basically going to crumble 00:13:50 So we try really, really, really hard not to disturb our gypsum formations. 00:13:54 This is just one of the types of gypsum formation, this one we have on one of our kind of like training routes. 00:13:59 They're called cave spiders. 00:14:02 So this one just has like a bunch of little leg looking things with like a little top and so it kind of reminds us of a spider just with a bunch of legs. 00:14:09 But yeah, super delicate 00:14:10 We do not touch the gypsum. 00:14:13 In Jewel Cave, we don't have ones that are quite this big, but these are rimstone dams. 00:14:17 They basically form when you have calcite that deposits and forms like essentially a dam for the water, and so you'll have water puddles inside these giant looking 00:14:27 Essentially, dams. 00:14:29 These ones were actually multiple feet tall 00:14:31 You had to hurdle over top of them, but in Jewel Cave they're a lot smaller. 00:14:34 They're like centimeters tall or inches tall, depending on where you are. 00:14:39 And then here this is like our most popular and most notable formation in Jewel Cave. 00:14:43 Our calcite spar. 00:14:45 Calcite spar is just a bunch of really pretty crystals that form on top of all of our rocks. A lot of times from the deposition of our calcite from when the water was filling The Cave and then drained out leaves behind all that calcite and then it bonds to. 00:14:58 That's when for an example of when you would study mineralogy is trying to figure out why these crystals are bonding together. 00:15:04 But they would bond together and then they form these really pretty calcite spar and in Jewel cave we have two different types 00:15:09 We have our nail head and our dog tooth spar. If you take a tour, you can see both different types of spar on that tour. 00:15:16 And then here another example of one of our hungry caver names is soda straws. 00:15:20 So we have a lot of soda straws in The Cave. 00:15:24 Essentially, they're very similar to stalactites, except one main difference. 00:15:27 They’re Hollow. 00:15:28 So they're basically like a straw. If you were to pluck one from the ceiling and try to drink out of it, it would work the same as a straw. 00:15:32 I wouldn't recommend doing that. 00:15:34 That’s a no no. 00:15:34 But if you were to hypothetically do that. 00:15:36 That's the difference between a stalactite and a soda straw. 00:15:41 And then down here, this is kind of. 00:15:43 A. 00:15:44 Big collage of different formations 00:15:46 So you kind of have a rimstone dam down here, but then you've also got your stalagmites. 00:15:50 And your stalactites. 00:15:51 So stalactites hang tight to ceiling and then stalagmites. I remember it as 00:15:55 In like little bugs that crawl around on the ground. 00:15:57 Don't know. 00:15:58 That's how I remember it, but. 00:16:00 That's just me. 00:16:02 So yeah, your 00:16:03 stalagmites are the ones that grow from the bottom up and your stalactites. 00:16:05 The ones that grow top down. 00:16:07 And then here another food name got cave popcorn. 00:16:11 Everyone likes popcorn 00:16:12 Maybe you don’t. 00:16:13 But a lot of people like popcorn 00:16:14 It's basically when you've got these calcite formations that form in these weird like lumpy fashions and they're really bumpy and they're honestly really not fun to crawl on. They're kind 00:16:22 Painful, but. 00:16:24 Yeah, so you got cave popcorn 00:16:26 Kind of just looks like popcorn or sometimes people say like cauliflower, but more or less we call them all popcorn. 00:16:32 And then we've got fun ones, these are called helictites 00:16:33 These are essentially they're very similar to your stalactites and soda straws except their axis of formation changes and so they're kind of like curvy and windy. 00:16:42 There are all sorts of funky shapes like I've seen ones that form in 00:16:45 The shapes of ‘U’s 00:16:47 Anything that you see that isn't completely, you know, on the same axis of formation, that's a helictite. 00:16:55 And then we've got box work. This is more popular at Wind Cave. 00:16:59 Wind Cave has a lot of box work. 00:17:00 It's actually not a super common formation, which is why it's so exciting that we have them here and at Wind cave. You won't see this in very many caves. 00:17:08 A very delicate formation and takes very 00:17:12 Specific conditions to form and so we're really excited that we actually have some here. 00:17:18 It Basically forms when calcite gets into like the cracks of rocks and then the rock actually erodes away, and then you're left with these really thin bands of calcite. That kind of just look like 00:17:25 Insides of a cardboard box 00:17:28 And then last but not least, we've got flowstone. 00:17:31 So flowstone is essentially the deposition of calcite across rocks, kind of similar to your cave bacon, except instead of kind of forming where gravity could take it, it forms kind of on the ground with the gravity and creates really pretty draperies. 00:17:47 So you'll have kind of calcite that looks like a waterfall. 00:17:50 It just looks like a rock waterfall. 00:17:58 So in order for caves to form, there's kind of three different processes that you'll have. 00:18:04 These include erosion, dissolution and then your lava flows 00:18:07 So lava actually forms its own type of cave, which is kind of cool. 00:18:11 So the first type of cave that you'll get 00:18:13 Is erosional. 00:18:14 This essentially forms when caves 00:18:17 Get hit with some sort of erosional factor. 00:18:19 This could be wind 00:18:20 It could be like grains of something else smacking into the rock and a, like slowly weathering it away overtime. 00:18:25 Not a very quick process by any means. 00:18:27 So one really good example is on shorelines, when you have the waves crashing into rocks consistently, eventually that will create a cave. If it keeps crashing into the same spot over and over again because it weathers away that rock so easily. 00:18:40 It's from when your particles are abrading the walls, and so in this picture 00:18:44 You actually have these little divots like they're actually called scallops. 00:18:48 So in cave when you get rocks and water, they're crashing against the walls with really high velocity, it actually chips away at The Cave walls and makes it larger. And we call those scallops. And so in this case, the enlargement of this passage would be erosional, not 00:19:00 Actually dissolution. 00:19:05 And in our case we have solutional cave 00:19:07 So here at Jewel Cave it's a solution cave. 00:19:10 It forms basically when you have acidic rock that gets into the cracks or acidic rock, acidic water that gets into the cracks of these rocks and dissolves away the rock overtime so. 00:19:20 In classic examples, caves are typically made in limestone, and so when you get that acid that reacts with the limestone, it actually dissolves the rock away and enlarges the passages. 00:19:29 That's kind of what happened here at Jewel Cave. 00:19:32 It commonly forms in rocks that are made of calcite, which is our limestone, and the acid that erodes it away, is typically carbonic acid, so it mixes with Co2 in the atmosphere and the soil. 00:19:42 Then reacts with that limestone and then erodes away all the rock. Not all the rock, but a lot of the rock. 00:19:50 And then we've got our lava flows. So the last type of formation of caves is with lava rock. 00:19:55 A lot of times when you've got kind of slow moving lava, the tops will cool 00:20:00 Like the tops and sides will cool a lot quicker than the inside because it's more in contact with the surface temperature until you get this nice shell of Hard Rock. But then on the inside you're going to have all this magma that's still warm, and so it's going 00:20:11 Actually end up moving out of that lava tube eventually, and it stops somewhere. 00:20:15 And so you're left with this hollow passage, which is pretty cool. And then similarly with basalt a lot of times it'll have, like gas pockets in it. 00:20:22 So if you have a magma tube with a bunch of gas in it, eventually it's going to find an opening and disperse. 00:20:29 And so you can actually be left with gas pockets too, so you can have kind of two different formations of these lava tubes. 00:20:34 Can have gas filled lava that eventually just disperses, and you're left with a nice little cave. 00:20:40 Or you can have more of like a tube where the inside just kind of like float out. 00:20:48 And then we're going to talk a little bit more about the specifics of the formation of Jewel Cave. 00:20:53 Like I mentioned, this was formed by the dissolution of that limestone. 00:20:55 It's a Solultional cave 00:20:58 And it actually a lot of times when you think about Cave formation, you think about underground rivers and how the rivers are what formed The Cave. 00:21:04 Not necessarily the case with Jewel Cave, which is why it's kind of a special cave and why we have so much calcite spar. 00:21:11 The distribution of this calcite spar actually indicates that The Cave filled with water and then it drained out and then left behind all this spar as opposed to just having a river that was constantly flowing through The Cave itself. 00:21:23 And so we're going to start from the very, very beginning. 00:21:25 So where did the rock come from (?? again, not sure what exactly I said here) 00:21:26 That Jewel Cave is made out of and that's our Pahasapa Limestone. 00:21:30 So in the Mississippian, which was about three hundred forty five to three hundred sixty million years ago, this area was covered with a shallow sea. Like we mentioned, it had a lot of different critters in it and that's why we have fossils. And when those critters died, their bodies 00:21:42 Sank to the bottom of the sea 00:21:44 And overtime, all their little bodies got compressed into a rock and that's lithification 00:21:49 So a lot of times for sedimentary rocks form it forms from grains of other things, and so in order for it to form, it has to have a lot of weight pushing down on it to create it into a nice, solid 00:21:57 Compact rock and so over time. 00:22:00 Those little bodies got compacted into what we have as the Pahasapa Limestone. 00:22:05 And these are just some of the common fossils you can find in the area. 00:22:08 Got little gastropods and another one called a Millipore fossil. 00:22:12 They're fun little guys, but. 00:22:16 So on top of that, Pahasapa Limestone, which is what we're standing on, is the Minnelusa formation. 00:22:21 If you were to walk the rooftop trail, you're going to be walking in the Minnelusa formation 00:22:25 It's made-up of five different layers of rocks, so you have five different units and they're basically all inter bedded sandstones, limestone, shale and dolostone 00:22:34 So there's a bunch of different sedimentary rocks that were deposited just on top of that limestone layer. And so that's why you have to take that long elevator ride down to The Cave. 00:22:41 Because we're not actually on the Pahasapa 00:22:42 Limestone, right here 00:22:43 We're on top of the Minnelusa, which was deposited 00:22:46 In the Pennsylvanian, three hundred twenty million years ago. 00:22:49 Lots. 00:22:50 A lot, relatively speaking. 00:22:52 A lot more recently than the Pahasapa Limestone. 00:22:58 So then we had the uplift of the 00:22:59 Black Hills. 00:23:00 So during the Laramide Orogeny about seventy million years ago, that's when the Rocky Mountains started to uplift. And with the Rocky Mountains, we somehow got lucky enough to get a little bit of uplift over here to ourselves. 00:23:10 And so when that igneous rock decided to start uplifting 00:23:14 That's when Jewel Cave decided to start tilting 00:23:17 A little. 00:23:17 So in the center of the Black Hills you have that giant massive uplift and all the sedimentary rock on top of all those igneous rocks eventually weathered away. 00:23:25 And fun fact, those sediments actually got carried away to the Badlands. And so a lot of what you see in the Badlands is stuff that we had here originally, so. 00:23:32 The rocks are kind of ours, you know, we can own those. 00:23:38 But when those rocks uplifted and the sedimentary rocks got carried away, the stuff surrounding the uplift actually ended up tilting as well 00:23:44 A little bit. 00:23:45 And so here at Jewel Cave, we actually have a slight tilt in our rocks because of that. 00:23:49 So when the rocks uplifted, jewel cave tilted slightly. 00:23:52 That's why we have so much faulting here. 00:23:54 So we have a massive fall out along the highway 00:23:56 Actually, if we were to drive the high the highway, you can see that we have the Pahasapa Limestone and you can actually see from the highway, but then we can't see it over here and that's why Jewel Cave is so much lower here. 00:24:06 Than if it were to be across the highway. 00:24:09 And so. 00:24:11 Yes. 00:24:12 That is why Jewel Cave is so far underground. 00:24:15 Black Hills isn't part of the Rocky Mountains, though. 00:24:17 No, it's not. 00:24:18 It's completely separate, but during that same uplift event, the Black Hills decided it wanted to uplift as well. 00:24:26 So Jewel Cave, as we talked about, is a dissolutional cave. 00:24:31 So there's a lot of debate about how Jewel Cave actually formed, and it's hard to tell because we weren't here when it formed. So we can only gather information from The Cave itself and try to decide how Jewel cave formed. 00:24:42 And about forty million years ago, the climate changed and we got a bunch of rain. 00:24:46 And so that's when all the aquifers recharged 00:24:48 And a bunch of groundwater decided to seep into the different rock layers. And so in this illustration, let me get my little clicker thing. OK, so we got a bunch of water that's soaking through. 00:24:59 The ground and that's picking up your Co2. 00:25:00 So the groundwater 's becoming more 00:25:02 Acidic and it goes through the shale layer, which typically is impermeable. But there's little cracks in it, so the water can get in and it gets stuck in 00:25:09 The sandstone layer here. 00:25:11 And so you've got kind of like a mini aquifer that's sitting on top of the rock layers and in that aquifer, you've got your acidic water, but it eventually finds cracks in that limestone layer below it, which is what forms our jewel cave. And so as that acidic 00:25:23 Water goes into these joints and these faults and all these little fractures, it actually ends up widening the fractures. 00:25:30 And more. 00:25:31 And as the water is seeping through The Cave, it's filling up as the water table 's rising. 00:25:36 And it's actually causing fluctuations in The Cave where you're getting this water 00:25:40 That's kind of flowing through The Cave itself, widening these fractures and then also kind of the water table decreasing and then the water drains out of The Cave and goes down. The water table hypothetically speaking, is down at the bottom of The Cave now. 00:25:54 And so with that, you have all these empty passages where the water was once flowing, but now it's not anymore. 00:25:58 Well, I should shouldn't say flowing, it was just kind of 00:26:00 There it wasn't necessarily a river, but it was 00:26:03 there and eroding away all these rocks, and so that's why you see all this calcite spars from when The Cave was filling and draining 00:26:09 It kept depositing on this calcite. When you go into the Jewel cave and you see areas where the rock has actually been chipped away and you can look at the full calcite crystal. That's why sometimes you'll see calcite on top of calcite. 00:26:20 See these different sized calcites. 00:26:22 Even see like water lines on the walls. And that's from all the different water, like water levels from when the water table was rising and falling. 00:26:29 And nowadays this is no longer an aquifer. 00:26:32 Enough erosion has occurred where it's actually cut down enough to where the water has flown out of the sandstone layer. And so now our main aquifer is the Madison Aquifer. Down at the very bottom of Jewel Cave, which is why we have cave Lakes. 00:26:48 No, not anymore. 00:26:50 Wow. Water coming up. 00:26:51 No, not in this cave back east 00:26:53 Yeah, you got to worry about that a lot, but not here. 00:26:56 So maybe you're going to touch upon this later, but is this why? 00:27:00 Hmm. 00:27:03 Wind Cave doesn't have the crystals 00:27:05 It doesn't have that barrier of water. 00:27:10 And. 00:27:12 What's the brown layer there? 00:27:13 That's just soil, yeah. 00:27:17 But more or less so with the tilting of the rocks 00:27:20 So we were a little bit further away from the center of the Black Hills and wind cave’s a little bit closer 00:27:27 And so when you think about the tilt of the rocks, we're actually tilting away. And the Madison limestone, the Pahasapa Limestone is higher, technically in elevation. The closer to the center of the Black Hills you get. But because of all the 00:27:38 Erosion that occurred. There's actually not like as much of that limestone over by wind cave. 00:27:44 So we have more of the limestone here. 00:27:46 Than what wind cave had. And so for that reason, we think that that's why we have more of the calcite spar and they have more of the box work. 00:27:53 Because we had more limestone that we had the water to seep through. 00:27:59 It's an interesting concept, and it's definitely still being studied and looked at because we don't know for sure we weren't here when The Cave formed necessarily, but that's kind of the working hypothesis. 00:28:09 Thank you. 00:28:14 And so Jewel cave today as we're because we're here, you know, the whole reason we're here is because it's been a hundred twenty five years of discovery. 00:28:21 Been a hundred twenty five years that people have known of Jewel Cave and we've been visiting Jewel Cave. 00:28:27 We're currently at two hundred and twenty point three three miles. 00:28:30 Growing even more with these recent airflow studies, we've discovered that we only know about three percent of The Cave, and that can mean that there could be thousands more miles out there. 00:28:39 We haven't explored like. 00:28:41 We've hardly even scratched the surface of jewel cave 00:28:43 We're two hundred twenty miles. There could be three thousand miles. 00:28:47 We have no idea, but with airflow studies we were able to determine that we don't actually 00:28:52 We haven't studied like much of it at all, which is pretty awesome. 00:28:56 So cave explorers have a lot cut out for them. 00:28:59 But yeah, so essentially how that works is in The Cave 00:29:02 You can take a small area which your cross-sectional area, so you could basically a lot of times what you could do is you could sketch it to scale and then you could input that into a computer. You can take these little air monitors. 00:29:14 And they'll calculate the volume of air that's flowing through that hole and try to figure out how much space there is in The Cave that could cause that amount of air to flow through that small space. 00:29:23 More or less 00:29:23 That's how it. 00:29:24 Don't ask me about the math. 00:29:25 I didn’t do the calculations. 00:29:28 That's kind of more or less the idea of how this works 00:29:31 And so with those airflow studies, we determined that volume wise of The Cave, we've only discovered three percent of The Cave volume, which is insane. 00:29:39 So I've always I've heard the story before that air flow and caves or some caves even out in this country. 00:29:39 Yeah. 00:29:50 Works with the tide 00:29:52 At the ocean, is there any truth to that or is that? 00:29:56 It's more so with the air pressure. And so when you have different pressure systems moving through, it'll change the air flow with The Cave. And so sometimes if you have like I think it's high pressure, The Cave will breathe in and then low pressure the cave will breathe out. 00:30:09 So if you have a high pressure system moving in, you're not actually going to have a whole lot of air flowing out. You're going to actually have it sucking in the air. And then with your low pressure systems. 00:30:17 And actually come back out The Cave. 00:30:19 So it's not necessarily what the tides is more so with the pressure systems and the weather. 00:30:29 So now we're going to kind of get into resource management. 00:30:32 What do we do? 00:30:32 Like everyone knows that we have a cave here, but like we have more than just a cave. 00:30:36 What all do we do here at Jewel cave? 00:30:38 National Monument. 00:30:40 Well, here to tell you, we do a lot of surface mapping. 00:30:43 This is my super fun Co-worker Forest we love Forest. 00:30:47 There we go there’s your plug. 00:30:51 So on the surface, as we talked about, we have that Minnelusa formation. And so we're curious. 00:30:56 Where is the Minnelusa formation? 00:30:58 What different rocks are we seeing on the surface? And does that surface geology correlate with what's in The Cave? And so we'll actually go out and wander around the monument and we're going to try to figure out where we see each of these different types of rocks and map 00:31:10 Them on a tablet. 00:31:11 And so we'll mark little points and then we'll take those points and input them into ArcGIS and then in ArcGIS we'll try to connect 00:31:17 The dots basically and figure out like OK, why 00:31:20 Does it look like this? 00:31:21 Why is it like this? 00:31:22 Is there a fault here? 00:31:23 Is there a fold here? 00:31:24 Are rocks bent. Are they broken? 00:31:27 Essentially more or less 00:31:28 And then we'll draw little maps like this. 00:31:32 And if you were to go out in the field and go to like one of these locations, you would theoretically hypothetically be able to find that type of rock there. 00:31:39 And so what 00:31:40 We're trying to do is basically get an accurate map of where all the rock types are on the surface of Jewel cave. 00:31:48 And then what we'll do is we'll go into The Cave and then we'll do different cave geology things 00:31:52 So what we've been doing a lot lately is taking strike and dip measurements, which like I mentioned earlier, when the Black Hills uplifted, it caused tilting of the rocks around it. 00:32:00 And So what we'll do is we'll go into The Cave and try to figure out what direction those rocks are tilting and see if they're correlating with 00:32:06 What we're seeing on the surface 00:32:07 And so if the rocks are tilting one way in the cave, 00:32:09 Do the rocks tilt the same way on the surface or? 00:32:13 Is there some other weird factor going? 00:32:14 Like was Jewel Cave tilted before or after the Minnelusa 00:32:17 got deposited and we're trying to figure out if there's a relationship between what's going on in The Cave versus what's going on in the surface. 00:32:25 And then there's also, of course, The Cave exploration component where we send people in and they spend anywhere from a day to four days mapping The Cave and exploring these new passages 00:32:33 And that's how we get our distance and they'll produce little maps like this where in Adobe Illustrator will input all these files and will sit there and trace out each individual detail and create a really detailed cave map. And so over time 00:32:45 We've gotten two hundred and twenty miles from little sketches like this on paper from inside The Cave. This is actually a really clean example 00:32:51 A lot of times they're covered in mud and dirt and manganese, but yeah, so you take these little distance tools in and you'll basically shoot to like different points and you'll be like, OK. 00:33:02 This is this distance. 00:33:03 This is it's this direction compass wise. 00:33:05 And this is the inclination or the angle at which we're shooting. 00:33:08 And then you can take all those measurements and create a map. 00:33:10 Pretty kind of. It's pretty cool. 00:33:12 Are are the rocks still moving? 00:33:16 Not so much. 00:33:17 Not so much in Jewel Cave. 00:33:18 it's pretty stable now. 00:33:21 Back 00:33:21 Like the uplift was happening and all this faulting was occurring not so much 00:33:25 But now that it's been settled for quite some time now, it's pretty stable, and especially since we don't have moving water in The Cave, if there was moving water, that'd be a whole different story. But 00:33:34 Because it's pretty dry, relatively speaking. 00:33:37 It's pretty stable 00:33:38 We don't really have to worry about it. 00:33:44 Invasive plant management 00:33:45 That's another pretty big thing that we like to hit in resource management. 00:33:48 We've got a lot of obviously a lot of plants. In 2000 We had the Jasper fire which burned about ninety percent of the monument, which is quite unfortunate. But after the fire came through 00:33:59 All of these plants that weren't supposed to be here finally had room to grow. 00:34:02 And so now we have a bunch of plants. 00:34:04 Aren't supposed to be here 00:34:05 And so over the summer, we actually have teams that come in and they try to take care of these plants and get rid of them and allow native species to grow. And a lot of times we'll do re veg efforts too where we'll plant like native seed mixes. 00:34:17 And so we'll have volunteer groups. We'll have scouting troops come in and we'll just sit there and pull weeds. 00:34:22 It's a great time, so if you like pulling weeds, please come and visit over the summer and help us pull weeds. 00:34:29 But we've also got biological control methods where we'll introduce bugs that will eat 00:34:33 The roots 00:34:34 Of these invasive plants and lay their eggs in these roots and actually eat away at these plants and kill them that way. 00:34:41 Or we'll do like herbicide treatments in areas where it won't infiltrate into The Cave and mess up The Cave biology. 00:34:47 Kind of just depends where we're treating and what method we're gonna use there. 00:34:53 Alright 00:34:54 And then we've got the more. 00:34:55 Know animal side of things 00:34:56 So we've got biology studies that we partake in with critters out at wind cave 00:35:00 So a lot of times we'll share our resource management staff between wind and Jewel Cave. And so wind cave, we help them with their Prairie dog surveys and dustings and so. 00:35:09 As many of you may or may not know, Badland’s, Prairie dogs, they have the black plague. 00:35:14 Poor little buddies. And so out at Wind Cave, they're trying to prevent that from happening 00:35:19 So they're actually dusting the Prairie dogs to try and kill off their fleas and their mites so they don't get the black plague. 00:35:25 And So what we're doing here actually is the second phase of that where we're brushing the Prairie dogs to count their fleas. 00:35:33 So we're trying to see if they're dusting methods are working. 00:35:36 We're trying to see if the fleas are dead. 00:35:39 We actually it varied between Prairie dogs. 00:35:41 Some of them had no fleas, other ones had a bunch of fleas. It really depended on the Prairie dog. But yeah, so that's more or less what we're doing with these little guys here. 00:35:49 I 00:35:50 Think they just? I wasn't there for that one. But I think from what I understand, they just like spray the colonies with stuff. 00:35:57 powder. 00:36:01 Get to brush Prairie dogs and get paid for it 00:36:03 Yeah, like I get to comb the Prairie dogs and they count their fleas. 00:36:10 Well, so I didn't include this in the picture, mainly because it might 00:36:13 Trigger some people 00:36:14 But when we catch them, when we catch the Prairie dogs, we'll take them out of their little cage and we'll scare them with a towel into this pillowcase. And then from the pillow case. 00:36:26 We'll dump them into a tube with like and I don't know exactly what they use, but like a gas essentially, that makes them fall asleep, and then they pass out, and then we take them out of their tube. And then we brush them. 00:36:42 And then we have ferret surveys 00:36:43 So our black footed ferrets are pretty endangered out here 00:36:47 Wind Cave is actually home to like about fifty Prairie dogs, Prairie dogs. Fifty ferrets, which is awesome considering they came from like a population of like just a handful out in Wyoming, which is fantastic. 00:36:57 Making a comeback 00:36:57 And we're super excited about it. 00:36:59 These are super fun little night shifts 00:37:01 These are probably some of my favorites to work, so we go out there and we have these spotlights that we shine out the windows of vehicles and we're looking for green basically. 00:37:09 Unfortunately there's this bird that also has green eyes and we get tricked quite frequently by this bird and it makes me 00:37:14 Angry. But when we see these green eyes shine, we'll walk out into the middle of these fields and we'll put traps in their holes like this. That just kind of stick up out of the ground and we'll put a reflector next to it. 00:37:26 That way, when we're driving by, we can look for green eyeshine in the traps, or we'll go check them. 00:37:30 So we don't lose them since it's dark and we can't see anything. 00:37:33 Then hopefully, fingers crossed, we catch a ferret 00:37:35 Doesn't happen all the time, we’re not always lucky. But we got lucky in this case. We're good. 00:37:41 And so. 00:37:43 Maybe you'll see this poking out of the little cage, and when you do, you take the cage out of the hole and you set it on the ground, and then you have this little microchip reader that you try to kind of. Hopefully the ferret cooperates and you try to 00:37:54 Like scan it for a microchip, because if it's already been taken in, he's been chipped. 00:37:58 And so you want to see if the ferret needs its vaccines because we're also vaccinating the ferrets against the plague because they eat the Prairie dogs with the plague. 00:38:06 And so. 00:38:08 We want to make sure that they're not going to die because they're endangered. 00:38:13 And so if the ferret needs to go to the vet, we put the ferret in a tube, and then we take it to the vet. 00:38:17 Yeah. 00:38:20 And at the vet, yes, they do get gassed. 00:38:26 And so. 00:38:27 Take the ferrets to the vet. 00:38:28 Then they get gassed 00:38:29 And then they get their vaccines. And then if they don't have a microchip, we give it a microchip and then we take it back to where we found it and we release it. 00:38:36 And this is kind of what they look like hanging out in their little holes. 00:38:39 We named this one Aurora because we caught it during the Aurora show in October, which was super fun. 00:38:46 But yeah, so they're making a comeback and we're super excited 00:38:48 They live in Prairie dog towns because they eat the Prairie dogs 00:38:51 And so another thing you can look for is if you're walking through a town, you see holes that are just like filled with dirt. 00:38:56 That typically means you have ferrets there because the Prairie dogs actually try to bury them alive, which doesn't work because the ferrets can just dig themselves out. 00:39:02 But it's they tried. It's OK. 00:39:09 And then we've got bat studies that we do, if you're, you know, a cave park, you probably have bats. Hopefully there's unfortunately been a fungal infection that's come through and killed off a lot of our bat population, which is really sad. 00:39:22 It's called white nose syndrome. 00:39:23 That's why when people come here for tours, we make them walk across the little pan of the hydrochloride. 00:39:30 It is because we want to make sure that people’s shoes don't carry it to other places and kill off their bat populations. 00:39:37 Unfortunately, we already have it here, so can't really bring it in because it's already here, but we try to prevent it from going elsewhere. 00:39:44 And So what happens is a lot of times, we get students from the University of Wyoming that come over here and do studies 00:39:49 On our bats. 00:39:50 We kind. 00:39:51 They come here, they go to Mount Rushmore 00:39:53 They go to wind cave, but they set up these mist nets, which are actually kind of hard to see. 00:39:57 But they're essentially 00:39:59 Really thin nets that are meant to trap bats, not bugs. 00:40:03 They still get the june bugs because the June 00:40:05 Bugs have little grabby legs 00:40:07 And we'll set them up over top of little pools or streams because the bats are thirsty. 00:40:11 They Like to drink water. So they’ll swoop down to the water 00:40:14 And they get stuck in the net. And so every ten minutes we send someone out there to go check the nets for I think total. Usually it started at eight AM and we ended at 00:40:21 Two am or eight. 00:40:23 Eight PM ended at two am, so every ten minutes we go check these nets and we hope for a bat. And when we catch a bat. 00:40:29 We put them in 00:40:30 A little paper baggie and we bring it to the table and we clothespin it to the table. 00:40:35 So we get our scale ready and we weigh. 00:40:36 The bat and then we take the bat out of the baggie and we sit there and do a bunch of different measurements depending on what the researcher wants. In our case, they wanted like wing length. They basically wanted a whole bunch of different measurements of this bat because they 00:40:48 Were studying how white nose syndrome impacted the bat populations and their diets, and a bunch of different factors. 00:40:55 And so this was our little data table 00:40:58 I was usually a note taker, but yeah, so we would basically just collect a bunch of data about these different bats and this guy right here, we have a lot of in Jewel cave. 00:41:05 The Townsend long eared bats. And they're super cute. 00:41:08 I love them so much. 00:41:10 But yeah, so it was a lot of fun. 00:41:11 And then we also have bat acoustic monitoring here too. So we'll set up these. 00:41:17 Essentially, like equipment that kind of listens for the bats and their different echolocation hertz and frequencies, and hopefully with that we can try to figure out our different bat populations here at Jewel Cave. We have what, nine, ten, ten now. 00:41:29 Different species of bats. 00:41:32 Large colony? 00:41:34 The townsends 00:41:35 We actually have quite a bit of in the historic area, which is one of the reasons why we don't offer those tours this time of year. 00:41:40 They it's a hibernaculum 00:41:42 And so we have a bunch of the townsends that'll flock there just like sleep and mate, basically. 00:41:47 which just super cool. 00:41:48 Do they come out during the winter at all? 00:41:50 They try not. 00:41:51 That's unfortunately one of the problems with white nose syndrome 00:41:53 It wakes them up from their hibernation and then they're like, oh, we got to go find food and then they fly out in the winter and there's not really any food for them. 00:42:00 So that's one of the reasons why they die 00:42:02 Are they affected by the cold? 00:42:03 Yeah. 00:42:05 Unfortunately, so they're not supposed to be out in the winter. But unfortunately, the times have changed. 00:42:13 Are there? 00:42:14 There. 00:42:14 Water. 00:42:15 Surface water pools like that on Jewel Cave 00:42:20 Acreage. 00:42:21 Yeah. So down by Lithograph Canyon, we have a couple little springs. 00:42:25 So this one was actually taken out by Lithograph Canyon. 00:42:30 I think this one was taken out on. 00:42:33 Oh, which road is that? 00:42:35 Mud Springs road. 00:42:37 Yeah. So we've got a few in the area 00:42:39 Not super well known, but they're there. Other times we'll use like the little troughs that farmers will set up for cows because they don't, they don't care what kind of water they just want water so. 00:42:53 Then another fun project that we get to do is mold an algae cleaning. 00:42:56 One of my favorites 00:42:58 Not really, but we got to do. 00:43:00 So as you know, you know mold and algae. It likes heat and light and darkness and moisture. And so in The Cave it's basically perfect conditions for this mold and algae to grow. When the lights are on because you've got that light source and so anywhere we have lights along the tour route 00:43:14 We basically have to clean it and treat it for mold and algae. 00:43:18 So again, Forest is cleaning up some algae and I believe. 00:43:24 Is this one in the formation room? 00:43:25 Might be. 00:43:27 But yeah, so the LED lights that we have in Jewel Cave produce enough heat and light that we actually get quite a bit of algae growth. 00:43:33 So what we've been doing a lot lately is going in there trying to spot clean and spot, treat the algae and. 00:43:39 Unfortunately, too, we get a lot of mold that grows on things in The Cave, whether it be from like food particles that people accidentally drop or 00:43:45 Garbage or 00:43:47 Spit, unfortunately, or even just like the wood that we have in the historic area, we get a lot of mold growth. And So what we do is we have to go in there and clean up the mold. So it doesn't spread anymore and rot out the wood. 00:43:57 It's just not healthy to breathe in either mold spores, so we try to take care of it when we see it and when the problems arise. 00:44:07 And we also get to clean the tour route 00:44:09 It's such a fun time and so when you go into the when you go on these cave tours a lot of times you don't realize it, but your hair falls out. 00:44:18 And so when you're on the stairs, the hair collects on the stairs. And so one of our jobs is to literally go into The Cave and pick up hair off the stairs. 00:44:27 And then another problem too is lint from your clothes 00:44:30 And so a lot of times lint from your clothes, garbage, dirt from your shoes, it'll fall down through the stairs and collect on these pans, underneath the stairs. 00:44:37 And so we'll go in there with vacuum cleaners, buckets and water sprayers. And we'll go in there and basically try to flush all of that debris down to the bottom of the stairs and suck it up with a vacuum cleaner. 00:44:49 So we. 00:44:50 Is the hair just 00:44:50 Human in nature? 00:44:52 Usually every once awhile I might get a Sasquatch. 00:44:56 I don't know. 00:44:59 No, I figured. 00:45:02 Yeah. So we'll. 00:45:03 We'll go in there and try to clean up the tour routes every once in a while too. 00:45:06 One of our favorite rainy day activities, if you can't do stuff outside 00:45:09 We'll go into The Cave and clean it. 00:45:11 This is just an example of last time we were in there, all the garbage we picked up off the tour route. It was insane. 00:45:16 We have these little grabby tools that we like put between the grates. Like grab all the garbage piece by piece. 00:45:22 Yeah. 00:45:23 It's not even intentional 00:45:25 I think it's just a lot of things that fall out of people 's pockets when they try to take pictures like we've gotten hotel key cards and like bus tickets for Crazy Horse and the receipts for the scenic tour and lots and lots of coins. 00:45:36 Neil 's favorite. 00:45:42 And then a lot of times you go in these little like rescue missions, which I want to clarify, we don't 00:45:47 Well, we do rescue people, but people don't usually need rescued. 00:45:53 Usually it's not the people that need rescued, it's other things 00:45:56 And so one fun example that we had recently within the past couple months was we had a Townsend bat that got stuck in the Scenic Tour area. 00:46:05 Sometimes bats find their way in and get lost. 00:46:07 So they. 00:46:08 Of the reasons that we think this might happen is that they're following the air pressure, and so when The Cave is breathing in the air, is flowing in and the bat might think that leads to a way out and they follow it, but it actually 00:46:17 Goes deeper into The Cave. 00:46:20 And we also have like an emergency exit or a portal entrance too, so they might have accidentally somehow flown in from there. 00:46:26 Not really sure, but regardless, the bat would have died if he would have stayed there. 00:46:30 And so one of the things we did is we tried to get the bats out of the scenic area when they're there because again, that's really deep into The Cave and there's not an entrance over there for them to fly out of. 00:46:39 And so we took this fun little net that we had to literally duct tape to a pole because it wasn't long enough because this bat decided it wanted to crawl into the furthest corner possible. 00:46:48 And we tried to scoop it into this net. 00:46:50 And then we secured it into the net and we take it outside and we try to put it on a tree. 00:46:55 Poor bat did not want anything to do with us, which is totally valid, but there’s our little bat 00:47:00 Little Townsend, so we try to rescue bats when they're where they're not supposed to be. 00:47:05 And then this was one of our fun little summer employees. 00:47:08 Love him. Miss him. 00:47:10 But children, they love to accidentally drop things or throw things over the side of the tour route. And so on this 00:47:15 Specific case. We were rescuing a jacket that got stranded on one of the tour routes. 00:47:19 I’ve rescued shoes. 00:47:20 All sorts of random items and then on the far right with our historic Lantern tour, people carry lanterns and sometimes the bottoms don't stay on. 00:47:28 They break and the batteries fall out. And so in this specific case, a battery decided to fall down this giant pit. 00:47:34 So we had to go down this pit and rescue a battery. 00:47:37 And there was a lot of other stuff down there too 00:47:38 It was not just a battery bracelets and broken glass and pieces of candy wrappers, and it was insane. 00:47:45 The pack rats like to kind of hoard they’re hoarders, so they. 00:47:48 Have rodents in them? 00:47:49 Yeah. Then that area of The Cave. 00:47:51 There's pack, rats and. 00:47:53 They're little hoarders. 00:47:54 They like the shiny stuff. 00:47:58 And we do so much more. 00:48:00 But that's just kind of the basis of what resource management is all about 00:48:03 We just try to take care of the space and make sure it looks nice and we can maintain it and that it's healthy and here for many, many, many years to come. 00:48:13 Well, it is 2 00:48:15 Feel free to keep asking questions 00:48:21 Thank. 00:48:22 You so much.

Join Ranger Sydney to learn about geology and speleology of the Black Hills.