EPOW - Ecology Picture of the Week

The Untold Story of Caves and Graves

Left:  Dripping stalactites, Lehman Caves, Great Basin National Park, Nevada USA
Right:  Cemetery, Frisco, Utah USA

Explanation:  I've been wanting to share this little story for quite some time ... since 1980, actually, when I made one of my many summer camping trips across the western U.S.  But this is not a story of camping, at least not in the usual sense.  It is about the hardiness of western settlers and encountering their ghosts in two most unlikely places.

Let's start with the left image in the main panels above.  Welcome to Lehman Caves, in 1980 a national monument and now part of Great Basin National Park in northern Nevada.  Lehman ("LEE-man") Caves contain classic examples of limestone formations including dripping stalactites, huge columnar stalagmites, rippled ceilings, and crystals and curtains and ribbons of calcite and other minerals.  

What I found striking was a hidden chamber, accessible by crawling through a narrow passage called "Fat Man's Misery" (in my slimmer days).  The chamber is now called the Inscription Room because early visitors from the 1800s would mark their names and dates -- earliest I saw was 1891 -- onto the ceiling with candle soot.  Amazingly, the names are still quite readable.

Elsewhere in the cave are etched other names of the bygone era, include those of Ab Lehman, discoverer of the cave, "Southern Utah Times," J.T. Bartlett and his wife Annie, sheriff Bartlett and Mrs. W.R. Bartlett, a saloon girl, and a bartender.  

Stalactites dangling from the cave ceiling, where
names etched in candle smoke tell stories of 19th-century visitors.

Let's move down the road, eastward over the state border into northern Utah.  

Today it's a highway, but once was dirt and sand ruts 
traversed by horse and wagon.  
Point A = Lehman Caves, Nevada; Point B = Frisco,Utah.

Here, we encounter the old ghost town of Frisco that once boomed with riches from the long-defunct Horn Silver Mine.  According to the historic marker at the site, placed by the Daughters of Utah Pioneers, this was a typical mining town, founded here at the foot of San Francisco Peak.  By 1885, over sixty million dollars in zinc, copper, lead, silver, and gold were hauled away by mule train and railroad.  Water was scarce and had to be shipped in.  

Up on the hill in the background are the tailings of 
the old Horn Silver Mine.

Eventually, the mine collapsed and the town became mostly deserted with only a few of the four thousand residents remaining.  By the 1920s all that was left were the ruins of the town, left to decay in the dry desert winds.  

These are the remains of the old charcoal kilns of Frisco.

I walked the hillside and came upon the old cemetery.  

Some gravestones were still legible and ... there staring back at me were the names Bartlett, the same name I saw etched in the darkness of Lehman Caves.  

I felt as if I was visiting the final resting place of an old friend.

Apparently, the Bartletts and other Frisco residents had visited Lehman Caves long ago and left evidence of their visit.  How striking to have discovered this link during my own explorations.  

So here is a lesson how humans -- individuals, living in difficult, trying conditions -- can leave their mark in surprisingly different locations across inhospitable terrain.  May the ghosts of their passage remind us of the hardships and triumphs they faced ... and, like other wildlife of these difficult desert environments, that humans can, too, be impermanent. 
 

Frisco, Utah ... where the ghosts of settlers past still tell stories.