With the temperatures rising the past couple weeks in Shoshone, ID our crew was looking for a break from the summer sun. So, when the GeoCorps offered to take us through a couple of lava tubes, and teach us about the geology of the area we did not hesitate to go. The first cave they took us to is the second largest lava tube in the lower 48. It was a two mile walk from the mouth to the back of the cave. Sometimes it was like walking through a train tunnel, other times we had to scramble over rocks or skirt around ledges, and at other points you could see where two or three clearly defined lava tubes stacked on top of each other.
The next cave’s opening was a long spout like tube that curved down in to a large room that mimicked the body of a tea pot, and if you stood in the middle of the room and looked up there was a large, almost perfectly circular skylight. Under the skylight there is a large pile of rubble, and growing among the rocks is a mass of ferns. This caused us all to ponder, since this is only place I have seen ferns since moving to southern Idaho. We also discovered that this cave was the perfect place to take ethereal photos. The trick to achieving the beam of light cascading down over the ferns was to wait for the afternoon sun to stream in though the skylight and then kick up a massive cloud of dust. The results are amazing.
The final cave we went to was my favorite due to the fact that there are little individual droplets of water hanging delicately off of the ceiling and walls of the cave. If you shined your flashlight down the length of the cave at just the right angle it caught the droplets in such a way that they looked like shimmering drops of molten silver clinging to the walls of the cave. We tried several times to capture this effect on camera, but to no avail. Exploring these caves made me feel as if I were entering a whole other world that I was not supposed to ever see.
Tea Kettle Cave
My plant duties have been slowly shifting over the past couple weeks. I am still doing scouting for sagebrush collection, generally while helping the range techs as they are working on range improvements, but I have also been working on plant clearances and rare plant documentation and verification. I have found that I really enjoy this work, especially making the plant lists for the clearances. The first clearance was in a riparian area, which presented us with several mystery plants that we were not familiar with since most of the summer thus far has been spent in the sagebrush steppe. I find the satisfaction of figuring out an unknown plant adds another level of enjoyment to the work. Next week will be spent verifying a couple rare plant occurrences, sagebrush mapping, and monitoring a willow planting sites. However, I did just learn that one day will be spent tagging monarch butterflies!