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.