Montana Spelunking

No work today, so I am spending some time at home getting the garden prepared for planting and enjoying my extra long weekend. Before heading outside though, I thought I should get some photo's uploaded from our weekend trip.

We've been making long trips all over the Northwest and passing by the things to see nearby, so we decided to head to Bozeman and see the Museum of the Rockies on Saturday, camp Saturday night at the Missouri Headwaters - which is where the Missouri River starts and Lewis & Clark camped before heading into the mountains - and then Sunday going to Deer Lodge and visiting the old Montana State Prison.

We left Missoula at 6:30 a.m.m and stopped at the Missouri Headwaters around 9:00 to check out the camping, since the campground was nearly full and rather small, we decided we would try to find somewhere else to camp. We rolled into the museum around 10:00 and started out with the King Tutankhamen (King Tut) exhibit, which is on display over the summer. The exhibit is pretty impressive, and there is a lot of information to go along with the display. The exhibit takes up two rooms and included replicas of his chariot, sarcophagus, and mummified body. We spent the rest of the morning checking out the King Tut exhibit and watching a planetarium show before we returned to the car for sandwiches.

The afternoon was the highlight of the museum by far though. Why? Because the Museum of the Rockies has lots of dinosaurs to see! Here's a triceratops and the largest T-rex skull discovered.There's a lot of cool skeletons on display and we really enjoyed seeing all the dinosaurs. I've been fascinated by them. The picture at the top of the blog is outside the museum and is a bronze skeleton of "Big Mike." I don't know about you, but that thing is big and I am glad they are not still around!

Our last exhibit was Picasso's ceramic work. Most people know Pablo Picasso for his bizarre paintings, but few know of his ceramic work. This was my favorite one, 'Picasso' is carved into the pot in a fashion resembling his art work, and the colors really make the piece look good.

After our trip to the museum we did some caching around Bozeman before heading west towards the Lewis and Clark Caverns State Park. We decided to stay the night and camp and then check out the caverns the next day - not our original plan, but nothing was set in stone to begin with. We brought out the dutch oven and cooked up some 'canoes' - which are just hot dogs wrapped in dough. We forgot the ketchup, but they were still pretty good even without the ketchup and I even have a few leftover for dinner today! The campground was nice, and there were not too many people around. The clouds threatened us with rain and thunderstorms, but never panned out into anything so we were relieved to not be spending the night in the rain and wind.

We cooked up some egg and sausage the next morning before making our way up the mountain to see the caverns. We took the first tour of the morning and started out with just the two of us, a couple from the Seattle area who were on their way to Lincoln, Nebraska to see family, and our tour guide Jim, who spent some time in Wayne, Nebraska. Just before we were getting ready to head into the cave, we were joined by another group and our tour group grew to 15. The tour was really nice and took two hours to go through the cave. We saw a few bats in the cave as we were headed inside and that was fun too! We went as deep as 550 feet below the surface, and the temperatures were right around 50 degrees. One of my favorite things about the tour was turning off all the lights while in the cave. I can't recall a time when I have been in complete darkness and couldn't see a thing - literally, no light anywhere! My mind started making think I was seeing objects, but when the lights came back on, what I thought I was seeing was nothing near what was there in reality. I took a lot of pictures inside the caves, unfortunately our camera doesn't take pictures very well in low light conditions so the pictures are hard to see unless I used a flash - in which case the lighting doesn't look nearly as cool as the lighting used in the caverns... but here's a few of the pictures anyway.

Stalactites hanging from the roof

Laura going down the 'beaver slide' - yes, you sit down and slide into the next room!A stalagmite coming up from the floor. Mmm, looks like ice cream!Inside one of the large caverns - standing next to the stalagmites.Headed down the long dark tunnelsIt's a tight fit - even for Laura!

I must be pretending to be a bat while I was crouching in the narrow openingAnother shot of the stalactites hanging from the roof.We finished up our tour of the caves around noon and decided to head to Butte to get some food. We decided we wouldn't have enough time to go through the prison, but that's ok because it's only an hour drive and we could save that for another day. We decided to do some geocaching on the way home and enjoy the nice weather. We made it home early enough to unpack the car and still catch an episode of The Simpson's! There aren't too many better ways to spend a weekend, especially when I can camp and do some cave exploring! We had a great weekend with the museum, camping, caching, and caving and I hope to maybe go back for another tour of the cave, I would recommend it to anyone who likes that sort of thing, it's well worth the money. Until again

-=Nolan=-