It's really hard not to spend some time working on the property and of course, that's what we did soon after arriving at Tin Camp but the main purpose of our trip this time around was to come here and bright and early on Saturday morning - Great Basin National Park.
And maybe more specifically, to head into the depths of Lehman Caves.
While Cindy and I are no strangers of Great Basin National Park or Lehman Caves, we made a lot of effort to come this time specifically because of a tour they've just reintroduced and haven't done since 1981. Even better, they've added new sections of the cave that has never been open to the public before as well. The only catch is, they only allow 8 people to go at a time and as luck would have it, we were able to get tickets for it.
Here's a map of what the cave system looks like marked in white. The brown highlighted section is the main trail tour and the red line I put in is where we got to spelunk through. The red arrow marks a tight optional squeeze into the Behman Annex and the Talus Room is bigger than the size of a football field.
Because this is a "wild cave" tour, as in, we'd be going off trail and doing a LOT of climbing and scrambling over slick rocks and squeezing through narrow spaces, a waiver was needed to be signed and helmets, gloves and knee pads were required to be worn. Here's a shot of our small group heading on in,
The main purpose of this 3 hour tour was to go deep into sections of this 10 million year old cave that aren't a part of the normal tour and because of it, we pretty much had to speed past other groups and miss most of the cool sights that you would normally get to see. That said, we snapped whatever pics we could along the way.
At the end of the Grand Palace, there's an observation platform that looks down into the Sunken Garden and it would be at this point where we got to start our tour. Essentially, we hopped the railing and scaled our way down some big slippery rocks. Here's a shot before we headed into the abyss and with just our headlamps to light the way.
Shot looking back up to where we just descended from.
From here, we slowly traversed our way over loose rocks tying to be careful not to touch anything delicate and as we made through the Royal Gorge.
At the end of the Royal Gorge, we hand to do some serious climbing up really big boulders to get into the massive Talus Room.
Here's a shot of Cindy coming up to give you a better perspective of what we had to climb.
I think the hardest part about the climb and really, just working our way through the cave was that there were delicate formations everywhere they were trying really hard not to touch or fall on.
So, what makes Lehman Caves so cool is that it is so rich in history. While it would be considered graffiti today's standards, the myriad of signatures left by early explorers from the 1800s can be found on the rock faces, stalactites and stalagmites everywhere.
Most of the signatures were made using pencils or soot but some were made using ink as you can see in the smudgy purple writing.
I think what's most amazing is that people were climbing their way down into this cave over 120 years ago and with just a handful of candles versus our LED headlamps.
Did I mention how much fun we were having!
Here's a shot of Olivia, our Ranger guide for the day and the person responsible for making this wild cave tour at Lehman Caves possible. I should note, it was at this point that she had to explain where we were going to next was optional as the hole you have to squeeze through was a bit tight.
Here I go!
Shot of Cindy coming through on the other side.
It's all hands and knees from here.
Amazingly, people made it way back in here and way back in the day.
Now, the main reason to crawl our way down to this point was to see a very rare and unusual helictites. This is the lightning bolt crooked formation that you can see in this photo and while helictites can be found throughout the cave, none have connected to a stalagmite let alone one that is off center to where it started from.
Oh man, good times for sure!!
The crazy thing about this cave is that trash can be found on the ground like this old bottle cap but of course, it's now a historic artifact.
Here we are back in the massive Talus Room and with its 80 foot vaulted ceiling.
Finding more signatures as we worked our way to the West Room.
Here we are at what is known as the Billboard and mainly because of the large Southern Utah Times advertisement written on the rock wall and the stories that went with it. Olivia spent a generous amount of time telling us all kinds of great stories about the signatures and history of the cave here and all by candle light.
