Jewel Cave National Monument

On Labor Day, we visited the nearby Jewel Cave National Monument. The displays in the visitors Center indicated that this would be a more picturesque cave then Wind Cave but the hike would be more strenuous. Jo decided that she had done enough caving with the trip to Wind Cave, so chose to check out the town of Custer more thoroughly while David went through the cave tour. As advertised, Jewel Cave had more attractive formations then Wind Cave, but again nothing like the colorful mineral formations in Luray Cavern. Perhaps one explanation is that neither Wind Cave or Jewel Cave have the large volume of dripping water in them that is present in Luray Caverns as responsible for forming so many of the colorful formations found there. It is nonetheless awesome to be traveling through Jewel Cave and Wind Cave and to appreciate the challenging adventure these caves present to the explorers who have crawled through miles and miles of narrow tunnels to map out and explore these caves. We were given just a small taste of what this must feel like when during the tours at both Wind Cave and Jewel Cave, the guide shut off the lights in the cave and exposed us to total darkness. That very darkness is what the cave explorers had to face if and when they ever lost the light from their tiny helmet lights.