Our 10th grade Senior Girl Scout troop recently had an amazing opportunity to do a unique community service. We went in and dusted the formations at Lewis and Clark Caverns State Park. It might sound strange, or perhaps not, once you think about it. Commercially operated caverns are victims of the very same and special environment the public go to see. The limestone formations that take millions of years to form in quiet dark places are, by their very nature, slow to adjust to change. There is no weather underground, literally nothing to wash or blow away the lint from years of visitors. If there had been such torrents or turbulence, then there would be no formations to visit.
Lewis and Clark Caverns have been open for tourist trips, off and on, since the turn of the century. Lint has been accumulating, then, for well over 100 years. I met Rhea Armstrong along with Molly Gheirke and Lynette Kemp at the Northern Rocky Mountain Grotto Annual Meeting, which was held at Lewis and Clark Caverns in March of this year. The Grotto, which my family joined a couple of years ago, is a caving group mostly made up by Montana and Idaho folks. At some point during the meeting, one of state park staff mentioned having older scout groups come and clean the caverns and I thought that sounded interesting.
I went back and talked to our troop about it, asking if they wanted to work at cleaning the inside of a large cave with toothbrushes, mostly removing dead skin cells and hair that had been accumulating since the early 1900's. I wanted to be blunt, to lay it out to them straight. I sort of enjoyed their shrieking, I guess, but also I didn't want to get there and have them get grossed out, scared, or otherwise change their minds. However, if they understood the dirty job and were still willing to work, what an interesting and fun community project this work would be! The troop voted (unanimously) to do it and I contacted the park in April. The park is open year round for camping and hiking, but the caverns themselves are only open from May 1st until September 30th. The cleaning has to be done when the cave is closed to the public so we set up a time for the second weekend in October. Rhea was our contact and would be our guide and supervisor for the trip. She was absolutely wonderful. Rhea first worked at the state park during her summers while in college and she loved it. Then she graduated and taught Montana History at a public school for years. When the assistant manager job opened up at the state park, she jumped at the chance to get back. Rhea reserved the campground cabins in April for our use during our October trip, setting aside all three cabins for us for both Friday and Saturday night.
Normally the cabins are $45 (each) a night, but the park would comp us one night since we were working one day. The cabins they gave us to stay in were fantastic. Like the camping cabins at a KOA, only spelled correctly, with heat, beds, electricity, and a fire ring and picnic table outside. Each cabin could sleep four people comfortably, more if sleeping pads were used on the floor. A tent is allowed near each cabin, though there's a limit of 8 people per site total. The water gets shut off for the year on October 1st, so we had to provide our own water and use the pit toilet.
We left Columbia Falls, Montana, on Friday at 6PM. It would have been nice to leave earlier, but we had to wait for soccer practice and work to be over for kids and adults. We had 7 kids and 4 adults in two vehicles for the drive. It got dark quickly and we had to drive slowly due to deer, so what would normally be a five hour drive, took us almost 6 hours. We rolled into the campground at Lewis and Clark Caverns State Park just before midnight. Rhea Armstrong had left the cabins' heat and outside lights on for us, and her home phone number taped to one of the doors. That was a nice touch. It was so comforting to see the lights of “home.” We all probably finally got to sleep at about 1 AM.
Previously when Rhea and I had been in contact, we decided 10AM on Saturday would be a good starting time. I knew we'd get in late and I knew they were teenagers, so I didn't want to start out with a battle to get them moving. Plus with the food and bathroom restrictions, our time in the cavern would naturally be short anyway so there was no need to start too early. Rhea said the groups coming to clean the cavern are typically older kids and adults because, simply put, there can be no food and there are no bathrooms inside the cave. While there would be seemingly no end to the amount of lint we found in the cave, we would be limited by our hunger.
With that in mind, I told the girls it would be an all you could eat breakfast buffet from 8AM until 9AM. We also packed snack bags for the car ride up to and from the upper visitor's parking lot. The cabins have electricity, so cooking was easy. Our packing list for “camping” was different than our usual list. This time it included a toaster, electric frying pan, electric tea kettle, a hot air popcorn popper, and an electric griddle. The breakfast menu offered eggs, sausage, toast, oatmeal, chocolate chip pancakes, peaches, cocoa, milk, and juice. The lunch menu offered nothing.
At 9:50AM everyone was geared up with a helmet, two sources of light (with spare batteries), old clothing or coveralls (clothing preferably, shall we say, not prone to producing lint), work gloves (again, not furry or fuzzy), cameras, and water bottles. One of the lights was to be helmet mounted, if possible, so hands could be free for cleaning. The clothing should be warm enough for the 48 degree interior temperature. Water was allowed, but I'm not sure if anyone ended up drinking much. We were too concerned about the lack of bathrooms, probably.
We met up with Rhea and drove up the closed park road together. At the upper visitor center we had some volunteer paperwork to sign since the state park logs how many hours volunteers spend in the park, and Rhea distributed our work buckets. The buckets contained toothbrushes, dust pans with brushes, and garbage bags. We had everyone make one last trip to the bathroom in the upper visitor center and then we hiked to the cave entrance. That hike took about 20 minutes and was noticeably uphill. It wasn't something you would just trot along if you decided to hit the bathroom one more time.
Before entering the cave, Rhea told us how we would go about cleaning the formations. Since the upper rooms are dry, it would be relatively easy to brush lint to the path and sweep it up into a dustpan. Rhea said that anything man-made could be brushed thoroughly, the lights and the footpath for example. The natural formations needed a lighter touch, but that any man-made debris on them needed to be removed. Rhea said she asked herself if it would have been there if humans had never entered the cave. If so, it got left. Pack rat poop and bat guano were okay. Lens caps, water bottles, match boxes, flash bulbs, and lint, lint, lint, were not okay.
The lower rooms, however, were wet. To clean them, Rhea said, the lint needed to be removed with more water, because just dry brushing makes visible dirt streaks,. The dirty water is then vacuumed up with a shop vac. Handy thing to have electricity in a cave. The shop vac is cumbersome to carry through the caverns, though, so Rhea wanted us to focus on the dry rooms. There was plenty to do there and that way we didn't have to lug the vacuums. In any room, however, we were to keep our gloves on. If we touched the bare limestone, the oils from our hands would prevent water from sticking and staying in that area long enough for the calcium carbonate, dissolved in the water, to be deposited. Since that's how the formations are created, that would be bad. Lint absorbs the water and prevents the formations from proceeding naturally, so that's bad too.
Rhea had us stop in our first room and spread out along a wall of popcorn formations. For one second, I could not see the lint. Then, once I saw it, some caught on every single little limestone popcorn bump, that's all I could see. It was everywhere. We each pretty much just stood in one spot and, starting up as high as we could reach, de-linted each popcorn nubbin on down to the level of the path where we swept up the piles. Piles bigger than average dust bunnies. These were ancient 100 year old Cave Dust Bunnies.
All this dusting in a cave made the calm air in that first room quite dirty. When we do this again, I'll bring dust masks for everyone. Also, instead of dusting all the way to the floor, I think bringing little ziplock baggies would help. We could knock the lint into the baggies right at each spot as we went, like some sort of dirty juvenile underground CSI team collecting 100 year old evidence. Still, the cave was extremely satisfying to clean and sort of addicting. When we walked, we carried our brushes in hand, ready for “drive by brushings” in areas too linty to ignore. In the Cathedral Room we were able to spread out and stay a while. The large space made the air much cleaner and it was a wonderful area to work in. We saw a bat in there, which one girl promptly named Gerrard. It was so satisfying to me to look up from my own meticulous work and see the headlamps of our troop scattered about this amazing place, all intent on their chosen area. Thank you Rhea and Lynette for allowing us to have this unique and rare experience. You are excellent stewards for this park and have made us better visitors.
LEWIS & CLARK CAVERNS STATE PARK:
http://stateparks.mt.gov/lewis-and-clark-caverns/
Mailing Address: Lewis & Clark Caverns State Park/PO Box 489/Whitehall, MT 59759
Phone: 406-287-3541
NORTHERN ROCKEY MOUNTAIN GROTTO:
http://nrmg.cavesofmontana.org/about-us/membership/
NRMG Basic membership is $12 USD per household, per year. Privileges of membership include access to the grotto newsletter, exchange publications from other grottos, photos, maps, trip reports and more!
GIRLS SCOUTS OF MONTANNA AND WYOMING:
http://gsmw.org/girls/join/
We’ll help you discover new opportunities, connect with new friends, and make a difference in the world around you. Senators, athletes, astronauts, and many more professional woman began received their first steps towards leadership in Girl Scouts:
RICHARD LOUV'S BOOK: “Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder”:
http://richardlouv.com/books/last-child/
In this influential work about the staggering divide between children and the outdoors, child advocacy expert Richard Louv directly links the lack of nature in the lives of today's wired generation—he calls it nature-deficit—to some of the most disturbing childhood trends, such as the rises in obesity, attention disorders, and depression.
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