Cave and Mammoth

26th September 2012

It’s feeling like the end of the holiday. We did squeeze in a couple of attractions today; the Jewel Caves National Monument and the Mammoth Site at Hot Springs.

The caves are the second most extensive in the world, but of course our tour only peeked at a fraction. Nevertheless, I’ve never seen so many metal walkways and rails in a show cave anywhere before. Our tour guide brought new meaning to the term “insanely perky”. Imagine the perkiest person you’ve ever met. Now imagine someone whose perkiness would even exhaust them. It didn’t help that one of our fellow tourists enjoyed doing Donald Duck impressions, and our perky guided loved his impressions, and so… you get the picture.

After all that, the caves themselves weren’t the most impressive for grandeur or cave formations that I’ve ever visited. Made me reminisce about caving in Tam Lod, though…

Much better was the Mammoth Site, in nearby Hot Springs. Our holiday is thus neatly bracketed with bones. In this case, a building has been built over a small hill which turns out to be the calcite-cemented deposits of an Ice Age sinkhole; a big

steep-sided pond fed by an underground spring rich in dissolved calcite. So, it’s a hole that eventually became a hill. With me? And many young male mammoths (rather like young male drivers – prone to stupidity) strayed into this sinkhole and died there, giving us the amazing spectacle of a dozen or so mammoth skeletons visible in situ inside this building. Unlike Dinosaur NM this is an active dig, so we were also looking at a half-dozen expert volunteers scraping away in search of more bones beneath. It’s not just mammoths they’ve found, the site has turned up specimens of dozens of species, providing a pretty good picture of the more accident-prone creatures that lived in this area 100,000+ years ago.

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