It is no secret that we love to visit national parks. A few weeks ago we visited Carlsbad Caverns, one of the most well-known caves in the United States. That got me thinking about all the other caves that we also visited in our travels. I decided to write a post about each cave that we have visited as a family and publish them in the order we visited them.
The first major cave experience we had as a family is from five and a half years ago. Emelie had just turned 3 and Peter was not yet 1. Micah did not even exist in our imagination. We were just a couple of weeks into our 3-month long road-trip that we took the fall of 2012. We had not planned it but discovered that Wind Cave NP was right on our planned route through South Dakota. We were not quite sure if it was a good idea to take to our very young children into a deep cave, a concern that proved to be completely unnecessary.
This is not a picture of a girl that is scared of being in a cave!
Because of the age of our kids, we were limited in what tours we could take and one day I wish to go back and do one of the more strenuous tours that include some off-trail crawling. The tour we took had lot's of stairs and stayed on prepared surfaces the whole way. Total length was about 2/3 mile with over 300 stairs.
Looking back up the stairs we just came down.
Most of the times we've been on a guided tour in a national part the guides have been excellent, and this was no exception. The ranger explained how the cave came to be and showed many of its different features. Wind Cave is known for its boxwork, a speleothem which origin still remains one of the biggest mysteries of Wind Cave.
Interesting honey-comb shapes called Boxwork.
Boxwork is not unique to Wind Cave but no other cave in the world has as much or as well-formed boxwork as Wind Cave.
More of the mysterious boxwork formations.
The ranger also gave us an opportunity to experience total darkness by turning off the lights in the cave. One person had a lit cellphone but when that was turned off it really was dark. It can be hard to imagine total darkness since it is not very common that we visit places where there is absolutely no light at all. This was totally dark, it would not matter how long we let our eyes adjust, it was still impossible to see anything at all. The kids did great, even with the total darkness. We were glad though, that we had a chance to prepare them before the ranger turned the lights off.
Brave kids in mamas arms.
One of the other people on the tour offered to take a family picture, and that is how we ended up with this nice family photo of the Lindstrom family... and that guy.
Family photo + that guy, who ever he is.
All photos in this post are taken by me with my old camera,
a Canon T3i with the 18-135mm f3.5-5.6 lens.
Thanks for following the journey of me and my family
as we travel and roadschool our kids around the USA.
If you like this post please consider upvoting, following and resteeming!
