Wild Caves

• Thursday, May 28, 2015 Section Editor Virginia Hutchins [ 208-735-3242 • vhutchins@magicvalley.com ] • B5

OUTDOORS

Fish and Game Seeks Fee Plan to Balance Competing Interests • B6

DREW NASH, TIMES-NEWS‌

Bruce Jennings of Buhl holds a slave flash while also attempting his own photography of extrusion spires known as the Three Sentinels on May 15 in Jawdropper Cave near Gooding.

DREW NASH, TIMES-NEWS‌

Shon Gerard of Bellevue checks out re-melt during a May 15 expedition at Jawdropper Cave, a lava tube near Gooding.

Club’s New Openness Offers Chances to Try Caving VIRGINIA HUTCHINS vhutchins@magicvalley.com‌

‌ WIN FALLS • T What not to say at a Silver Sage Grotto meeting: “Tell me where the caves are.”‌ Do that, and the cavers won’t take you anywhere.

Responsible spelunking relies on an attitude of preservation, and there’s a lot in Idaho’s lava tubes and limestone caves that can be damaged forever by careless explorers.

“We’ve always been a secretive group,” said Steve Frye, chairman of Twin Falls-based Silver Sage Grotto, an organization of the nonprofit National Speleological Society.

But Frye is leading the caving club into a new era of cautious inclusiveness.

It welcomes families to its campouts and has taught rappelling skills to children as young as 6.

It leads school and youth groups into caves, counting on them to become ambassadors of cave conservation. It already had a website, but in mid-May the club created a public Facebook page.

Frye picked up this philosophy from Midwest caving groups: Locals know many of the cave locations and they’re likely to explore anyway, so why not help them do it right?

Still, Silver Sage Grotto d o e s n ’t d ra g p e o p l e to caves.

“If you really, truly want to go caving, you’ll seek us out,” Frye said.

The Club’s Growth‌ Chris Anderson, Robert Wilkinson, Marc James and Randy James founded Silver Sage Grotto in 2001, and it averaged about 10 paid members through the years.

“However, we have tripled in size since 2012 with 30 paid members, not including non-caving family members who do also attend our events,” Frye said. About 25 “affiliated members” cave with them and go to club meetings but haven’t joined as paying members.

The more the grotto trusts you, the more caves you get to see.

And if you want to join up, you’ll have to leave the room while the members vote you in. Individual members can veto someone’s candidacy if they feel strongly about something they observed on a caving trip. Nobody wants to rappel deep into the Great Rift with someone who disregards safety practices.

Dues are $18 a year. Paid members get discounts on merchandise, priority on limited trips, participation in Bureau of Land Management and National Park Service projects and grotto parties. They also cave with other NSS grottoes in Idaho and neighboring states.

What Else the Club Does‌ Grotto members serve as cave stewards for the BLM and Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve, Frye said, a role that offers opportunities for bat monitoring, cave surveying, search and rescue and access to caves generally closed to the public.

“They are top-notch, and they really do care about the resource,” said Blaine Potts, BLM’s outdoor recreation planner for Craters of the Moon.

The grotto’s cavers aren’t policemen, but they can report people who deface caves or harm bats. They clean up trash and graffiti in caves, with equipment from the BLM. They practice rope skills all winter and train others — including government employees.

And if Facebook albums are any indication, they’re a particularly social bunch.

The grotto owns big tents, cook stoves and portable toilets for group campouts.

A Chance to Try It Out‌ Over the Fourth of July weekend, Silver Sage Grotto plans a free “Family, Friends and Kids: Entrylevel Caving Camp,” calling it an opportunity to try caving and meet the club members. They’ll camp south of Magic Reservoir Please see CLUB, B6

Wild Caves

Grotto’s Cavers Escort the Uninitiated to Fantastic Sights VIRGINIA HUTCHINS vhutchins@magicvalley.com‌

‌ OODING • In the darkness 45 feet below G ground, three fantastic spires guard a low passage decorated in cave coral.‌ Between 5 and 6 feet tall, the Three Sentinels are towers of drips and blobs and mini lava tubes. They’re all rock, but it seems that at any moment they might sway or grunt warnings in an alien language.

One Sentinel is black, like the basalt familiar to More Photos southern Idaho- On Magicvalley.com, see ans. Its neigh- a gallery of more of Drew bor is strangely Nash’s photos from inside mottled by gray Jawdropper Cave and and white. And Gypsum Cave. the Sentinel on the left is exotic red-brown rock.

Thousands of years of evaporation have covered it in feathery brown mineral fronds, like sea creatures, their white tips sparkling in the light of cavers’ headlamps.

These three in Jawdropper Cave are the largest extrusion spires known in Idaho.

About six miles northwest of Gooding, JawDREW NASH, TIMES-NEWS‌ dropper’s loops and passages are lava tubes, This close-up shows one of the Three Sentinels, in Jawdropper formed as the surfaces of a river of molten Cave near Gooding. lava solidified into basalt while the lava inside flowed and drained away.

The Sentinels are beloved by a small and historically secretive corps of local cavers. But these days the Silver Sage Grotto is recruiting members, and its cavers escort the uninitiated into this and other gated caves on public land.

Still, you won’t get into Jawdropper if Silver Sage Grotto leaders aren’t convinced you’ll respect the underground art gallery.

And they don’t give out cave locations.

Shon Gerard of Bellevue was among four Silver Sage Grotto members who took two journalists and a Bureau of Land Management employee to Jawdropper on May 15. As they approached the Three Sentinels, Gerard expressed a shared sentiment: “I’m so glad nobody ever found this cave.”

DREW NASH, TIMES-NEWS‌ Please see CAVES, B6

A pahoehoe lava flow formed this rippled floor in Jawdropper Cave.

DREW NASH, TIMES-NEWS‌

Steve Frye, chairman of Silver Sage Grotto, points back to a group of cavers before entering Gypsum Cave on May 15 near Shoshone.

Gypsum is gated, and cavers who want to enter must get a permit and the key from the Bureau of Land Management.

B6 • Thursday, May 28, 2015

Faint Stars Galileo Discovered Were Just Tip of Iceberg

‌T

he existence of stars too faint to see with the unaided eye was unknown until Galileo began examining the sky with his first telescope.

Despite its small size, it revealed so many stars that his desire to chart them gave way to despair, and he abandoned the effort soon after. ‌For the next two centuries, astronomers with greater telescopes (and patience) than Galileo catalogued tens of thousands of stars. But a revolution arrived in the 1860s, revealing stars invisible to even the largest telescopes.

Spectroscopy is the study of the colors emitted and absorbed by chemical elements, each with its own blend of hues. When a star moves toward or away from us, the Doppler effect shifts its spectral colors toward the blue or red, respectively. A stellar spectrum possessing both blue- and red-shift is a telltale sign of a pair of stars in a close mutual orbit, appearing as one in the telescope.

On the next clear night, look low in the SSE around 11 p.m. The brightest object there is Saturn, with a steady light (unlike the twinkling, dimmer stars around it). About a thumb’s width at arm’s length below Saturn, and a little to the left, is Acrab, in the head of Scorpius.

A small telescope shows Acrab to be two stars (1 and 2). Larger telescopes split 1 into A and B, while

Chris Anderson Skywatch

Sky Calendar through June 10

Planets: One hour after sunset: • Venus: W, low • Jupiter: W, mid-sky • Saturn: SE, low One hour before sunrise: • Saturn: WSW, extremely low Moon: Near Saturn 5/31-6/1. Full moon 6/2, 10:19 a.m. Last quarter 6/9, 9:42 a.m.

Hubble-class telescopes can split 2 into C and E. Spectroscopically, A and E are both binary pairs, making Acrab a sextuple: Aa and Ab orbit one another every seven days; Aa/Ab and B orbit a mutual center in 610 years; Ea and Eb’s mutual orbit takes 11 days; Ea/Eb and C coorbit in 39 years; and Aa/ Ab/B and Ea/Eb/C follow a mutual orbit of at least 16,000 years.

Next column: Beauty and the Beehive.

Chris Anderson manages the College of Southern Idaho’s Centennial Observatory in Twin Falls. He can be reached at 208-732-6663 or canderson@csi.edu.

IDFG Fees: Panel Outlines Efforts to Balance Competing Interests ERIC BARKER Lewiston Tribune‌

‌L EWISTON • Idaho Department of Fish and Game commissioners struggled during their meeting last week in Lewiston to come up with a fee increase strategy that might win favor with the Idaho Legislature without undercutting the agency’s authority or approving programs hunters and anglers oppose.‌ The department’s fee increase legislation, which would raise fees 15 percent to 20 percent but lock current prices for people who purchase a license every year, was generally wellreceived by lawmakers, hunters and anglers during the last legislative session. However, the bill was pulled at the commission’s request after some legislators sought amendments.

Those amendments would have allowed landowners to sell the hunting tags they receive for providing big game habitat, mandated additional auction tags for animals like deer and elk and implemented a bonus-point system for the state’s annual controlled hunt tag lottery.

The commission has the authority to implement each of those strategies, but has chosen not to, often at the behest of hunters. Many hunters oppose all three proposals and see them as an erosion of an otherwise fair system that doesn’t favor wealthy hunters. For example, auction tags would allow people with deep pockets to get the tags they want, at the cost of making longer drawing odds for everyone else.

But some legislators viewed the commission’s opposition as rejecting a tool that could raise muchneeded revenue. Commission Chairman Fred Trevey of Lewiston said it is a tool the commission didn’t seek.

“The Legislature gave

the commission authority. The commission did not ask for the authority,” Trevey said. “We never chose that as an avenue. It was forced on us.”

Commissioner Will Naillon of Challis said not only was the idea forced on the commission, but it came from a small group of wealthy hunters who had the ear of powerful lawmakers.

“This was a particular lobby that pushed that,” he said.

Brad Corkill of Cataldo said he is not likely to change his mind on auction tags, especially after hunters praised commissioners for pulling the fee increase rather than succumbing to the will of legislators.

Several commissioners said it would be helpful if hunters were polled on their opinions. Commissioner Ken Anderson of Rigby said it would be useful to know the percentage of hunters who oppose things like auction tags so it can be communicated to legislators. Similarly, Mark Doerr of Kimberly said polling would help show legislators there is public opposition to the proposals.

Department Director Virgil Moore said if the commission and department fail to address the desires of legislators in some way, their attempts at a fee increase next winter could be in trouble.

After a long discussion, commissioners chose not to alter their policy of opposing auction tags, allowing landowners to sell tags and a bonus point system. Instead, they directed the department to poll hunters and anglers on their feelings on the topics.

Commissioners said they will also attempt to better explain their reasoning behind the policies.

The commission also decided to press forward with its price-lock concept and fee increase package during the 2016 legislative session.

DREW NASH, TIMES-NEWS‌

Jeremy Callen of Filer reviews where his group is during a May 15 expedition in Gypsum Cave near Shoshone.

Caves

Make the call, and you’ll talk with Blaine Potts, BLM’s Shoshone-based outdoor recreation planner for Craters of the Moon.

“If they call for a permit, anybody can get in,” Potts said.

But you’ll need to allow at least a couple of weeks for paperwork and scheduling.

To issue a general entrance permit for a restrictedaccess cave such as Jawdropper, the BLM requires a resource adviser to accompany the group, which may total up to eight people.

Advisers designated for each cave have been in that cave at least three times and are knowledgeable about its vulnerable resources and its dangers. Many of them are Silver Sage Grotto cavers.

“Generally we just choose from the grotto population or from our office staff,” Potts said.

••• The paperwork is the easy part of getting into Jawdropper.

You’ll crawl over piles of loose breakdown, your nose a few inches from the dirt.

You’ll suck in your belly and raise your ribs to maneuver past a sharp corner of rock just inches from the opposite side of a tight passage.

Even where you can walk, it’s often at a crouch.

And basalt doesn’t forgive. If a kneepad or elbow pad slips, you’ll get a painful surprise in the next crawl space. Even in a helmet, bumping your head is memorable.

Tiny reflectors placed on the floor of Jawdropper confine the damage of cavers’ footsteps to a narrow corridor and steer them around sensitive areas like stalagmites, stalactites and descriptively named lava formations — Hanging Thumbs, Sitting Trolls, Ropy Floor. In one direction, you’ll see the red side of each reflector. Turn back toward the cave mouth and you’ll see a path of white.

Cavers’ mnemonic is a

nod to the dangers of their enterprise: “White, light.

Red, dead.”

••• In darkness, it’s no wonder headlamps dominate the gear talk.

The May 15 cavers’ first destination was Gypsum Cave, about 12 miles northwest of Shoshone — the second-longest lava tube in the lower 48 states.

“OK, guys, we’re going to kick the sun on here,” said Jeremy Callen of Filer.

That seemed an invitation to admire his new headlamp, a $97 model with enviable LED output.

On his $15 helmet, Bruce Jennings of Buhl wore a $600 headlamp of machined aluminum, custom built in Bulgaria.

Built to withstand extreme conditions, it can run a spotlight and a floodlight simultaneously.

“It took three months for the guy to build it and get it to me,” Jennings said.

At the time, it used the newest, hottest emitter. In another three months, it was outdated.

LED technology is moving fast, Callen said, as they hiked through a Gypsum passage wide enough for easy four-abreast conversation. “Ten years from now, these will be a joke.”

Frye chimed in with his battery power and lamp features. A few minutes later, he discovered his battery was dying — an occasion for ribbing from Callen.

“That’s because I used it all year and never charged it,” Frye said.

••• You’ll need powerful lights to fully appreciate the size of Gypsum. One section of the cave has six traversable layers of tube, separated by rock. Pieces of the dividing rock collapsed, leaving huge rooms with multiple stories — and precarious sidewalks clinging to the walls.

On May 15, Gerard, Potts, Callen, Jennings and Frye

spread out on several layers to illuminate photographs of a big, complex room. Patient with the photographer’s changing instructions, they showed off Gypsum with proprietary pride.

Chris Anderson, a Silver Sage Grotto founder, re m e m b e rs s u rvey i n g Gypsum in 1998. Hoping to claim the designation of longest lava tube in the lower 48, Anderson and a caving buddy jammed themselves into every hole that might add feet to the cave length traversable by humans.

That fame went instead to Washington’s 2.735-mile Deadhorse Cave, but Gypsum’s 2.682 miles is impressive nevertheless. (A cave’s total length tallies all traversable passages, including those that lie atop one another. North America’s longest lava tube is Mexico’s Ferrocarril-Mina Inferior, at 3.851 miles, and the world’s longest is 40.7-mile Kazumura Cave in Hawaii.)

G ro u n dwa te r t h a t leached calcium from windblown silt worked its way into Gypsum Cave, forming crystals of calcium sulfate dihydrate. For years Gypsum was known as Cocaine Cave for that fine, white powder. Before the cave was gated in the late 1990s, locals trashed it with parties and disturbed bat hibernation with fireworks.

“We’ve only been seriously gating caves for the past 20 years, at least in this area,” Potts said.

Even behind a gate, Gypsum is vulnerable.

A capsule just inside the mouth holds a logbook that cavers sign. The May 15 group found discouraging news in the most recent note, left by a member of the Boise-based Gem State Grotto in August 2014.

“Seems as if the Chocolate Factory had new damage,” it read.

About half a mile from the entrance, the floor in one arm of the cave is a flat expanse of chocolaty brown rock, fractured into sharpedged bricks.

Callen’s explanation: “Willy Wonka had some excess waste.”

Anderson’s explanation later: At one point, this part of Gypsum was wet.

Rock powder ground off by glaciation and transported here by wind accumulated in the cave, forming loess that dried and cracked.

But the chocolate color puzzles even him.

Despite its years of violation, this ancient underground world retains some mystery.

How to Get in Touch‌

Club website: Caves. org/grotto/ssg includes email links to Silver Sage Grotto leaders.

Fa c e b o o k : Despite its newness, Facebook. com/IdahoCavers is a good place to check out photos of group caving trips and find details on upcoming events to which the club will welcome

nonmembers.

The club also has a closed group on Facebook on which it plans caving expeditions and shares speleological news. The club invites some nonmembers to the Facebook group but periodically purges the list to limit it to people considered active cavers.

Continued from B5

••• Somebody did, of course — in the 1980s. But the “nobody” Gerard means are the people who party in caves, leaving behind trash and graffiti.

Magic Valley’s serious cavers clean up those messes. They also try to educate the public about protecting caves’ geological and archaeological value and the bats that hibernate in them.

But in a handful of caves around southern Idaho — dubbed “sacrifice caves” — the spelunkers have stopped fighting the partiers.

One of those is Dead Horse Cave, not far from Jawdropper. As often as cavers cleaned up Dead Horse, Steve Frye said, someone else came along to drink beer with his buddies or declare undying love in spray paint.

The Hailey man is chairman of Silver Sage Grotto, one of three Idaho clubs associated with the National Speleological Society. He’s a passionate protector of the fragile and the vulnerable.

On May 15, Frye sprayed down fellow cavers’ boots and gear with Formula 409 between one cave visit and the next. Cavers follow decontamination protocols though white-nose syndrome, a fungal disease killing bats across the eastern U.S., hasn’t been found in Idaho or adjacent states.

Inside Jawdropper, the big tooth of a camel or horse is marked by a ring of rocks.

Gypsum crystals, clinging like frost to basalt, float down in a caver’s breath. A smoothly wrinkled floor — like the disturbed surface of a pudding — wears a crust of evaporite minerals, and dripping water has scoured leopard spots into the crust.

As fellow cavers positioned lights for a photographer documenting the Three Sentinels, Frye pointed to the ceiling, where gas-filled molten lava solidified into dangling bulbs.

“If we come in and break it, it’ll be broken forever,” he said.

••• Heavy metal bars block the crawl-through entrance to Jawdropper.

The cave’s mouth is at the bottom of a rocky hole on the desert, where a section of lava tube collapsed. Part of the metal is removable to open a small, square gate — locked, and labeled with a Bureau of Land Management phone number.

Club Continued from B5

beginning Friday, July 3, and take people into nearby caves “that are safe and not intimidating,” the club wrote in an event post on its public Facebook page (Facebook.com/ IdahoCavers).

DREW NASH, TIMES-NEWS‌

Steve Frye of Hailey examines a red coating on the cave rock in a small area of Jawdropper Cave.

Meetings: The Silver Sage Grotto meets at 7 p.m. on the second Thursday of each month at College of Southern Idaho’s Twin Falls campus, in the Taylor Building’s room 258. Nonmembers are welcome.