The Caves and Devil's Tower

Thursday we broke camp at Wind Cave and drove to Jewel Cave National Monument in South Dakota and Devils Tower National Monument in Wyoming.  We camped at a KOA at Devils Tower.

Jewel Cave and Wind Cave are 20  miles apart, approximately.  They are both better described as cave systems.  Both have miles and miles of unexplored openings.  They are  like  a webwork of tunnels and crawl spaces and could be connected.  So far they haven’t found a connecting passage between them. 

Each cave, all caves I guess, form from limestone, water and geological happenstance.  Even though these two caves are close together and share a lot of  similarities, they are also very different.  The so-called boxwork formation is common in Wind Cave but not in Jewel Cave.  The Nail Spar is throughout  Jewel  Cave but  not  in Wind Cave.  See the pictures.

I don’t think any  words need to be added to the pictures of  Devils Tower except  to say  the orange colored ones were taken  at sunrise.

Yesterday,  I mentioned  a few things about our  trailer experiences so far.  There is another you might find funny.  Even though we have a kitchen sink and hot water, washing  dishes and pots and pans is hassle.  Space is just small.  So it makes it easier to pre-clean everything and we found a good way to do that is to let the dog lick it all clean first.  Then a final washing is easy.  But everything has its price and now the dog won’t eat dog food anymore.  So we’ve had to stop that and go back to manual dish washing.

Devil's Tower from a distance

Devil's Tower at Sunrise

Devil's Tower at Sunrise

Nailspar formations of Jewel Cave

Boxwork formations of Wind Cave