Exploring Wind Cave And The Mammoth Site At Hot Springs, SD – (9)

Exploring Wind Cave on the Natural Entrance Tour At Wind Cave National Park

Wind Cave is one of the largest natural cave systems in the United States and has been protected and preserved by the establishment of the National Park around it.  This cave system is also home to one of the most sacred places on earth for the Lakota Sioux Native American Indian tribe and many other Native American Tribes.  The word sacred is often thrown around, but in this case the Lakota creation story literally springs from this cave system and from one specific portion that I’ll discuss later.

Getting onto one of the cave tours isn’t as easy as one would think, because of the number of visitors to the park who want to do the same thing.  To get on a tour, you need to purchase tickets ahead of time, either in person or via Recreation.gov.  We chose to go to the Visitors Center early one summer morning and purchase the tickets, allowing us to do a bit more research on which tour we would enjoy the most and what tickets were available.  It didn’t take much for us to choose, as several of the longer tours were sold out and several tours would not allow children.

Available tours were/are:

• Garden of Eden Tour- Least Strenuous – $14.00 per adult
• Natural Entrance Tour- Moderate- $16.00 per adult
• Fairgrounds Tour- Strenuous- $16.00 per adult
• Candlelight Tour- Age 8 and up only- $16.00 per adult
• Wind Cave Tour- 4 hours- $45.00 per adult
• Accessibility Tour

So we grabbed tickets for the Natural Entrance Tour…which is special because it allows you to see the sacred site called Maka Oniye (the actual physical Wind Cave) from which the Lakota tribe and other Native Americans emerged from when they left the underworld spirit lodge.  This was special, as we had heard and seen references to this particular spot, but never imagined we could get that close to see it.  We were also excited for this tour because we could view and photograph the rare and very fragile formations within the cave called boxwork.  This one cave system has more boxwork in one place than the rest of planet Earth….in one place only, Wind Cave.

Read the entire Lakota Emergence Story here, that goes hand and hand with Wind Cave, as seen above.

To say the Wind Cave system is large is an understatement.  To date, the National Park Service thinks that only about 11% of the entire cave system has been found and the known portion of the cave system winds around for about 150 miles- right now.  Here’s a photo of the known system, but notice that it doesn’t end.

So, out of the list of the 25 longest/largest cave systems in the United States, Wind Cave is #6 in the entire world, a very large and complex cave system with massive spiritual, historic and scientific value preserved for all visitors by the US National Park Service.

Besides the unquestionable historic and spiritual value of Wind Cave for certain tribes of Native American peoples, Wind Cave also holds a treasure trove of fragile and mostly hidden treasure inside its depths.  Slowly forming mixtures of water and minerals combine inside this cave to form something known as boxwork.  It’s defined this way:  “Boxwork is made of thin blades of calcite that project from cave walls and ceilings, forming a honeycomb pattern. The fins intersect one another at various angles, forming “boxes” on all cave surfaces. Boxwork is largely confined to dolomite layers in the middle and lower levels of Wind Cave”.

Here’s what it looks like in real life:

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The other impressive thing we noticed was that Wind Cave National Park allows/has room for skoolie’s, near and dear to our hearts.

The Mammoth Site of Hot Springs, SD

The same day we explored Wind Cave, we made time to take a deep breath and take a drive just 15 minutes further south, to The Mammoth Site in Hot Springs, SD.  Wow, what a story this site has…we’re so lucky it wasn’t destroyed when it was found.  Instead, the site was purposefully preserved and left intact for continuing generations of researchers to study.

Shortened version of the story:   In 1974 the site was being leveled for a suburban housing site when the first bones were seen in time to stop the earth movers.  The landowners son brought the discoveries to the attention of the researchers from university, and the basic initial research produced multiple mammoth specimens, all trapped in one specific location over time.  The location turned out to be an ancient pond that turned into a sinkhole, but impossible for mammoths to get out of once they went into it.  The landowner recognized the value of the progressive summers of research as more and more fossils were discovered and plans for the housing development were scrapped.  Out of this rudimentary tents were put up over the dig site, then metal sheds and eventually the current building and site were established….over the dig site.

The fact that the dig site has been left intact is really cool to see + there’s continuing live digging as the visitor tours the site, all from overhead so you can see down into the dig.  I was fascinated by this place and the various stages of development it went through since 1974.   Here’s a few pics:

The Mammoth Site is still an active dig site, is an accredited museum and has universal access so anyone can see the displays for themselves.  There’s lots of parking and outdoor displays, but the great views of the dig are inside the giant building, waiting for you to come see them for yourself.  If you get to the Black Hills in South Dakota, don’t skip this one or Wind Cave.

We also spent some time and grabbed lunch in Hot Springs.  What a cool town with great food and cold micro-brew + freshly made ice cream.  We needed a day to play complete tourist but loved getting back to our campsite to make a camping meal and sit around watching the buffalo roam….right outside the campground fenceline. 

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