Rain and Samantha's Excellent Adventure: August 2012

Samantha: If ever you find yourself in the region, the Oregon Caves are incredible, and you have to go, and so far have been one of my favorite sights. It only costs $8.50 for a 90 minute tour of the marble caves, complete with geology lessons, local folklore, and 30,000 year old black bear. Upon arrival, you go through the basic safety talk and screening, and are asked if you've been in any caves or mines east of the Mississippi since 2005. The reason for this, as some of you know, is to prevent the spread of white-nose fungus, a horribly lethal illness that has been decimating eastern bat populations for close to a decade (http://www.nps.gov/orca/naturescience/white-nose.htm). Once you pass, you are given a token to exchange for your ticket into the caves.

The Caves are a National Monument, designated such by President Taft in 1909. According to our tour guide, they are part of an extensive watershed that provides potable water for that region, the upper remainder of which is currently under the guardianship of the Forest Service. The National Park service responsible for the Caves would like to incorporate the rest of the watershed into the monument thereby protecting it from development. Our guide also said that the fees to enter the Caves pay for all the monument’s expenses, which is nice as it keeps them from leaning on government funding. Here's their link: http://www.nps.gov/orca/index.htm

Our tour guide was wonderfully knowledgeable, animated, and all around great to talk to. The caves themselves were a pleasure to get acquainted with. It was about 80 degrees F outside on the surface - in the caves, it was a refreshing 44 degrees F. The marble bedrock that comprised the caves was just beautiful. I loved the narrow passages, the low ceilings, all of it. Near the end of the tour, the passage opens up into a huge room, with magma (it never reached the surface, therefore it's not lava) solidified in a stripe across the ceiling, and from there you can scale a narrow stairwell to a smaller space above, dubbed Paradise Lost. The stalactite formations in here are called drapes, but to me they look like jellyfish. It is truely wondrous stimulation for the imagination.

Rain: So every time that I get a tour at a National Park (/National Monument-slight difference), I get a strong urge to want to be one of the rangers giving the tours. It seems like the best job ever! You get to be outside all the time, you get to be around really awesome history, and you get to teach a whole bunch of other people all about that history. Just about every Park Guide I've gotten a tour from seems to be very enthusiastic and really enjoy their work. Anyone who knows me should know that I like two things very much: talking a whole bunch, and inserting bits of random knowledge into conversations as much as I can (I really can't help it, it think it stems from watching The Magic Schoolbus too much when I was a kid...). Therefore, this has led me to conclude that being a Park Ranger (like the fabulous looking Mel in the first picture) would be a great job. Plus, look at that sweet outfit!

I plan on talking to every Park guide that we run into about how they got their job, so I know what I need to do. Mel told Samantha and me that it can be a pretty hard job to get, especially at the more popular parks, but I'd still love to try. She informed us that first aid certification is a must, and things like wilderness first aid and first responder certifications are very beneficial. When we get back to Vermont, I'm going to go about seeing how to acquire those things.

This tour was great. There was a group of about 15 of us, and Mel took us all over the inside of the caves. There were tons and tons of wonderful geologic features and I learned a lot more about caves than I'd thought possible. They are fragile ecosystems that need to be treated delicately, which humans basically learned by trial and error. I contemplated a bit on the interesting trade-off that going to places like this entails: Given that these places are so delicate, there's a good chance that people will mess them up by mucking around without understanding whats going on without them. But at the same time, visiting such a place gives so many people a better first-hand appreciation for how wonderful our natural world is and makes them more aware of how important it is to treat it well. The Caves have an extensive set of walkways laid into and carved out them, which were put there in the earlier part of the last century before people understood that they were a little bit more complicated than just some pretty scenery. For example, something as simple as putting a sealed door underground at the halfway point in the paths altered the ecosystem by changing the airflow, humidity and temperature throughout. Today the rangers and workers there are much more aware of how everything flows together and are working to preserve it as well as possible, which I very much admired.

Ok, seeing as how I told myself at the beginning that this would be a short post, but still feel like I could go on forever about it, I'll end it now. Here are some pictures that Samantha and I took (both from underground and at the top of the hill we took a hike on aftward). The pictures honestly don't do the place justice, but we did our best.

Have a look:

Roots from trees have grown down through the rock and through the caves to get to the water inside.

This one is now dead, but has been well preserved.

An example of drapery stalactites.

Geology!

People used to break off stalactites for souvenirs. Now, that's a felony.

Old-time explorers would write notes on this one section... the cave has since been healing itself and new rock has grown over the writing, sealing it in.

Stalagmite (on the lower left).

Stalactites.

Column

Upward view of the Paradise Lost room.

Black bear bones-not fossilized because they were preserved so well in the climate of the cave.

The forest outside.

YAY NATURE!

Moss everywhere.

Panorama of the Siskiyou Mountains.

So many layers of mountains.

Old Man's Beard Lichen

Old Man's beard on everything!

After we pulled over to take a picture of this, a sweet lady from the farm told us her dyslexic mother in law had first written it, but it became such a hit that they kept it around and are now well known.