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Wind Cave | |
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The headquarters for Wind Cave. This is a wonderful park, and contains more than just the cave. There is a campground, animal viewing areas, including an immense prairie dog town, and numerous hiking trails winding through the surrounding hills. |
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The main entrance. A cardboard caver descends into the museum below. |
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As with most national parks, there are displays, and a museum area. Actually, these are pretty good introductions to the place, and not a bad way to spend an hour or so, before going into the cave itself. |
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the geologic portion of the museum, highlights some of the formations in the caver, and gives the prospective caver an idea of what to look for . |
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Some of the original documents, and photos of the early explorations of the cave. |
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The historical portion of the museum. The old fashioned clothes on the mannequin are typical of what a woman caver might wear, during the discovery and early exploration of the cave. |
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This is the path to the cave entrance, which sits a hundred or so feet off of the back of the headquarters building. |
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This shelter is where tour groups meet and assemble before being taken down into the caves. |
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A look back at the building, from the tour assembly area. |
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This is the only known natural opening to this cave. Our ranger guide shows us how the cave breaths. |
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A close up of the natural entrance. |
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This most unnatural entrance is how the visitor enters the cave. It is sealed to prevent the cave from drying out. |
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The way down. Wind Cave is a cave of rather narrow passages, quite the opposite of the large chambers of Carlsbad, or the enormous tunnels of Mammoth. |
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A look back up, where just a glimmer of daylight may be seen. |
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Left: Proceeding down, we have quite a way to go. These caves sit fairly deep within the Black Hills. Below: One of my fellow visitors stops to take a photograph. |
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Left and Below: Down we go, finally reaching the bottom. |
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Crawling through crack and crevice, we wind our way through the cave. |
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Though not particularly narrow (there are far narrower caves here, on the wild cave tour), this is strictly single file. |
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My first really good view of some of the cave's famous boxwork. This particular set looking a bit more like a stone spider web, than a set of boxes. |
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And down we go, another set of stairs. The cave is amazingly dry, considering how far down we have come. |
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More travels through underground canyons. |
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The tunnels continue to change shape and size. |
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More boxwork, though now of a different color and composition. |
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