Custer, South Dakota.

Our goal on this day was to visit both Wind Cave and Jewel Cave, both located near Custer State Park in South Dakota. Roadwork blocked access to Wind Cave so it was temporarily closed, but we did make our planned visit to the Jewel Cave National Monument.

Our tour started just a short distance from the parking lot at the visitor center. It is here where tours are scheduled and you receive an appointment time to meet your tour guide for the escorted trip into the cave.

Once we were given a time, we explored the visitor center, then a few minutes before our scheduled time, we walked a short trail down to the cave entrance. We were the first to arrive and we waited until the remaining guests and the tour guide arrived on schedule. The schedules fill rapidly so you would be wise to make a reservation for your tour in advance at https://recreation.gov.

There are several types of tours available, but due to Covid restrictions during our visit, there was only a basic tour with limited access to the largest areas of the cave near the entrance. According to the NPS website here, tours from basic to strenuous are again available.

That non-descript building constructed in front of the concrete cave entrance contains an airlock to protect the atmosphere inside the living cave. Upon completion of the tour, you will exit the same airlock, and you will be required to walk across a mat with a decontamination fluid that is designed to protect against the spread of White Nose Syndrome, a disease that impacts the bats. The website notes that other cave sites may not allow visitors to enter their cave with the same boots, clothing, or personal devices that were carried into Jewel Cave.

Note that on their website, they provide a list of prohibited items. Photographers should be aware that tripods and monopods (as well as hiking poles or anything that might contact the cave floor) are prohibited. The entire list of items that should be left in your car is included at the bottom of the cave’s guided tour page linked above.

During the presentation, the guide uses a large flashlight to shine on the rockfaces to point out certain features of importance to the guests.

With our limited tour, we were a bit disappointed that the stairs we saw throughout our tour on our few levels were blocked from going deeper into the third longest cave in the world. This viewpoint is as far as we could go. When we make our trip back to Wind Cave, we’ll have to see if we can also do a more complete tour of Jewel Cave. We will have to find out if there are restrictions from entering one cave with the same footwear and clothing as we wore in the other. As we didn’t get to go to Wind Cave, I didn’t ask the question.

All of the images captured here were taken with my Sony RX-100V camera. I captured three exposures for each image and blended them via Lightroom in HDR. The cave is dark so you might wonder why my Flickr site indicates that I only used an exposure of f/5 when the camera supports as low as 1.8 to 2.8. When you pick an image to merge into HDR, you select the range, and right-click on one of the three to choose the HDR option. I picked the middle exposure and that’s the metadata that gets passed along to the final HDR image.

As you can see by the image above, noise at low light levels was a problem. I used Lightroom’s Details tool to set Luminance and Chrominance noise adjustments to between 50 and 70 to strike a balance between noise removal and loss of detail.

Closed toe shoes are required for all tours and booking a tour in advance is the best way to ensure you didn’t waste a trip only to find your tour is sold out. They have four types of tours, a Discovery Tour, a Historic Lantern Tour, a Scenic Tour, and a Wild Cave Tour.

If there are members of your family that find caves to be unappealing, there are three surface trails for hiking. The tours range from .5 miles (.4 km) to 5.5 miles (8.9 km). Trail guides are available in the visitor center. Trail details can be found here.

If you would like to pixel peep or view the photo metadata, you can click on a specific photo to view it on my Flickr site. You can also check out the images in the entire album here. Happy Spelunking!

John Steiner

Travelling through Tennessee, it’s not hard to find signs promoting Ruby Falls. Of the sights we elected to visit on our day trip to Lookout Mountain, probably my favorite visit was Ruby Falls, but Rock City was a close second. Though both are the typical tourist attractions, crowded and a bit on the expensive side, it’s no wonder why they are popular. Rock City will be featured in an upcoming Travel Tuesday… but I digress, this post is about an underground waterfall inside of the limestone caverns formed during centuries of erosion due to underground water flows eating away at the limestone.

In 1928, Leo Lambert, a cave explorer by avocation, decided that the limestone caves inside of Lookout Mountain would make an interesting tourist attraction. At this point, the cave where the falls are located had not yet been discovered as there are no natural openings to that area inside the mountain. During the creation of an opening to provide a second egress to the main cave, Leo and his team discovered the waterfall cavern. He named the falls after his wife, Ruby. With the discovery, Leo found himself with two attractions, the original cave he planned to make into an attraction, and the newly discovered caverns that led to Ruby Falls. Eventually the public’s preference to select the waterfall cave led to the closure of the original attraction.

After touring Carlsbad Caverns, a National Park where rangers do their best to light naturally to show the beauty of the natural elements in their natural colors, the folks who own Ruby Falls have no such restriction. You’ll find plenty of colored lights giving the entire cave a bit of a “light show” feel. There are plenty of signs defining the names of the shapes in the mind of the discoverers (and probably owners). The gallery of images below provides a handful of examples.

The tours are narrated with friendly guides who describe the various formations on the longish walk to the falls, the final attraction in the cave, as you might expect. The passages are narrow with no provision for handicap accessibility. Along the way to the falls, our group stops regularly to let other groups who have already visited the falls pass by on their way back. People returning from the falls have no such waits and are given the right-of-way for a quick return to the elevators for the ride back to the surface. Often these breaks are punctuated with information from the tour guide or simply a time for questions and answers.

My preference would have been for the way the National Park Service lights their caves using neutral lighting that provides a view of the true colors of the formations. However, natural colors of cave formations are much more subtle. Clearly, Ruby Falls is a private attraction and as such, the colored lights become part of the show. The large cavern features loud music as well as an ever-changing light show, several samples of which are included in the gallery of images.  Even the elevator ride down the 1100-foot (335 m) shaft is accompanied by a guide with some basic information for the group. At the bottom, there is a short wait as the group of 30 or so visitors are shuttled to the bottom in small elevator-sized groups. The gallery of images below features several views of the falls as well as some of the attractions we viewed along the way. Click on an image to enlarge it and to scroll through the gallery.

John Steiner