Later on Saturday night we celebrated my niece, Sophie's, 2nd birthday. I got her a couple of little people playsets. It's surprisingly hard to shop for a 2 year old. I wanted to be the cool uncle and get her something really nice, but for a 2 year old, "really nice" toys generally mean obnoxiously large (i.e. a little tykes backyard swingset and slide). Since my brother lives in a 2 bedroom apartment, I didn't think that they would appreciate a monstrously large gift.
Sunday morning I woke up early and decided that I would finally get back to visit Minnetonka Cave. I stumbled upon the cave a couple of weeks ago while I was out riding. I had even purchased tickets for the cave tour but then decided that I was too impatient to wait the 2 hours until the next tour started. So, ever since then, I've been meaning to get back up there.
The plan was to wake up early, ride up to Bear Lake for one of the morning tours and then be back by early afternoon to take care of things around the house. Unfortunately, things didn't work out quite that way. I left the house at quarter to 7, had breakfast at Village Inn and then worked my way up to Bear Lake through the back roads. A little more than 5 hours, one wrong turn, and a brief but torrential downpour later, I purchased tickets for the 2 P.M. cave tour.
I hate to say that the cave tour wasn't worth it, because I always think that it's worth it to go exploring in a cave (even when the exploring is moderated by a tour guide), but this cave was in bad shape. From previous cave tours I had learned that there are two things that are commonly done in caves when they are opened up publicly that are very damaging to the cave and must be controlled. The first is that the lighting that is installed to illuminate the cave formations often causes algae growth on the formations.
Algae does not naturally grow in caves because there is no light. In other caves they have clued into this and will only turn the lights on in a room as the tour group is walking through. In addition they have experimented with different types of lighting to control the algae growth. In Minnetonka cave the lights appeared to be left on all day (i.e. the tour guides didn't make any effort to turn them off as they moved to different areas) and the resulting algae growth was disgusting. You can see some of the damage in the photos that I took. Note that the above picture is actually a formation illuminated by green lighting and not a formation plagued with algae.
The second thing is that when the entrance of the cave is opened up it increases the airflow through the cave and causes it to dry out. Most other caves have installed doors at the entrance of the cave and sometimes even between sections of the cave to control the airflow through the cave. Tour guides are usually really careful to make sure that the doors are always shut behind them before moving on to a different section of the cave. There was a door at the entrance of Minnetonka cave but it looked like it was only shut at night to make sure that people could not get into the cave.
The lighting in the cave was pretty amusing. They used these cheesy colored lights all over the place. Half of the time the lighting wasn't even shining on the cave formations. It was almost as if the lighting was just "mood" lighting. The lighting also seemed to be strewn about haphazardly. For instance, there was a lot of formations where there was one light shining at the formation and another light shining away from it directly at you... making it really difficult to get a good picture.
Speaking of lighting, I've always been disappointed with the pictures that I've taken in caves. This is because the flash from the camera gives the formations an entirely different look than what you experience first-hand. So, this time, I decided to take all (most) of the pictures with just the natural lighting in the cave. Because of the reduced lighting the the exposure time is much longer and you really need to hold the camera perfectly still for a couple of seconds. Some of the pictures turned out OK but most of the time I failed at holding the camera perfectly still.
1 comment:
That was very informative. I probably would have gone through the cave and said, "Wow, look at all that algae," not realizing it had anything to do with poor maintenance and preservation techniques.
S-Boogie likes both the house and the carnival set very much. You chose well. Thanks.
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