Lehman Caves

After leaving Yosemite, we headed for Great Basin National Park to check out Lehman (pronounced Lay-man) Caves, which is only one cave in spite of it's name. There are various legends surrounding how this cave was discovered by Absalom Lehman, back in 1881. Our favorite is the one that claims he was out riding when suddenly he dropped down into the cave. He was quick enough to lasso a tree and held on for four days until someone rescued him. He said the hardest part was keeping his legs around his horse so the horse didn't fall.

I had always had trouble remembering which were stalactites and which were stalagmites until Rob gave Matt his hint to help remember: stalactites has a "c", like ceiling, and stalagmites have a "g" like ground. So stalactites come down from the ceiling and stalagmites come up from the ground. Eventually, when they join, they become a column. Check out our Lehman caves album at http://picasaweb.google.com/debdistante/LehmanCaves for pictures of columns, new cave formations, some of the gorgeous colors, and the many shields which are found in the cave.

You can actually see a column on the left of this picture. To the right is cave bacon. Essentially, cave bacon is drapery that is marbled, like bacon. The guide we had for our tour was fabulous and gave us all kinds of information like this. Otherwise, I would have no idea why some of the formations would be called drapery and some cave bacon when they look much the same.

This shows an area with lots of color in the cave. Many of the formations are white or grayish but every now and then there would be a very colorful area such as this one. The color is caused by various minerals seeping in with the water.

This is one of the more exotic shield formations in the cave. It's called the "Angel Wing" because that is precisely what it looks like. Lehman Caves has more shield formations than any other cave. Our guide explained to us how the shields are formed and why it's so rare but that's been many days ago now and my brain is currently wiped out from hiking all day.

And for your last picture, here is Matt about as far into the cave as you can go. The path behind him used to lead into a part of the cave that used to be included but was determined to be unsafe back in the 80's. They are currently working on returning that portion of the cave to it's natural state, pulling out the paved walkways, cables, wiring, etc.

After our tour, we enjoyed a picnic in the national park and then headed for Delta, UT to dig for fossils.