Tuesday, July 25, 2023

Rushmore and Wind Cave

Today we went to Wind Cave National Park to earn junior ranger badges and hike. Then we went to Mount Rushmore and earned another junior ranger badge.
Wind Cave has a small population of bison but plenty of prairie dogs. We walked to a prairie dog town and sat in the grass for 20 minutes to observe the prairie dog behaviors. We saw canyon wrens This is a lonely bachelor bison.
Later in the afternoon we had a 2 hour tour of Wind Cave.
These are boxwork configurations which are common in Wind Cave but rare elsewhere. This cave is a dry cave. The boxwork are thin sheets of calcite that form a honeycomb pattern. Some are as thin as paper. Others are so thick it would take a hammer to break them.

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