These Loneliest Caves

The core of good resource management requires thorough knowledge of the resources to be managed. History is littered with catastrophic results when managers either didn't understand (or didn't care about) the value of a resource and its needs. National parks and forests are typically better understood than most wild lands, but the caves and karst of east-central Nevada remained little studied until recently. Their remote setting in the middle of the Great Basin along "the loneliest highway in America" (so dubbed in 1986 by Life magazine), far from any universities and concentrations of cavers, kept this world-class karst grossly under studied and documented.

Cave specialists Gretchen Baker from Great Basin National Park, home of Lehman Caves, and Doug Powell, from Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest, wrote and were awarded a multi-million dollar, multi-year, multidisciplinary project grant through the Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act Program (SNPLMA).

Baker and Powell worked with the Great Basin Institute (GBI), a private, non-profit, interdisciplinary field studies organization based in Reno, Nevada, to assemble their "Dream Team" of cave scientists: Archaeologist: Bri Patterson; Biologists: Shiloh McCollum and Jean Krejca; Geologist: Louise Hose; and Paleontologist: Peter Druschke. GBI was an essential partner as they greatly streamlined hiring employees, provided human resources, computers, and IT support, rented housing and office space and facilitated working on both park and forest lands. The Dream Team started work on the project in June 2022. We investigated 15 caves on the forest and 27 caves within the park. Over the next sixteen months, we made over 130 cave trips and inventoried the biological, cultural, geologic, hydrologic and paleontological resources in each cave. The depth of the inventories varied between disciplines and caves, but are probably best considered "reconnaissance." Following the field work, data were analyzed, confidential reports to the agencies were written, and a final presentation to the agencies and GBI managers was made. The written reports provided 1,550 pages of information about the caves in the area.

Here are some of the highlights:

Surveying, Mapping, and Exploration

• The team helped resurvey seven forest caves and seven park caves, often with volunteers.

• The team pushed new leads in what was known as a small cave, which resulted in a 1.6 kilometer long and 172 meter deep cave.

• Water Trough Cave had its length more than doubled thanks to a high lead.

• New maps were made for several caves that didn't have them, with the bulk of the cartography done by Druschke.

• Several existing maps were updated, in some cases working with the original cartographers, by adding metric scales and profiles, identifying true north arrows, and making corrections resulting from ground truthing.

Geologic Resources

• The geology team comprised Louise and Doug Powell was aided extensively by Peter Druschke and volunteers Harvey DuChene, Donald G. Davis, John McLean and Jerry Atkinson. Our work built extensively on file and newsletter reports by earlier caver-scientists Alvin McLane, Dale Green and Ron Bridgemon.

• We documented the geologic setting of all 42 caves, including what geologic formation hosted the cave and where the cave was relative to the area's major faults.

• We made complete, detailed geo-inventories of most of the caves and at least reconnaissance-level geo-inventories of the remaining half-dozen. We demonstrated that at least some (probably most) of the caves started to form more than 10 million years ago. Working with Victor Polyak and Yemane Asmerom of the University of New Mexico, cave mammillaries from four caves yielded radiometric ages between 10 and 14 million years. These dates are minimum ages for the caves.

• We identified two previously unmapped, large landslide areas in the park. Four "fracture" caves formed along the head scarp of a large, unmapped slump block. Another cave entrance formed where a large block of limestone is separating from a cliff and intersects an older hypogenic and epigenic cave at the base of the fissure. Assessing the potential risks of these geologic hazards was beyond the scope of our project, but identifying the potential problems was a spin-off benefit of the project.

Biological Resources

• The biological team comprised Shiloh McCollum, Jean Krejca and Gretchen Baker.

• Many potential new species were found and sent to specialists for identification.

• The most exciting biological find was an apparent cave-adapted palpigrade (micro whip scorpion). These arachnids were the first identified in the State of Nevada and represent a significant range extension.

• A solid baseline of cave biology for future use following wildfires, climate changes (including groundwater changes), and direct and indirect human impacts was documented.

• An innovative mark-and-recapture study was conducted in three park caves. Through this work, we documented that Model Cave had at least 196 harvestmen and 32 pseudoscorpions. The study also informed us about the life-cycle of the harvestmen as juveniles that were found throughout the year.

Paleontological Resources

• Peter Druschke led the paleontological work.

• He made the first paleontological survey for many of the 42 caves.

• Our work confirmed a Pleistocene American horse in Lehman Annex Cave.

• Our efforts demonstrated that there is a potential wealth of paleontological resources in the very high-elevation caves, which may provide valuable information on Pleistocene and later changes in the animal populations in the Park.

• Aided by a team of expert paleontologist who were already working in the area caves, Drs. Steve Emslie and Jim Mead along with Larry Coats identified American lion and horse fossils in Old Mans Cave, American camel and wolverine remains in Cathedral Cave, and loads of other paleontological resources.

Cultural Resources

• Cultural fieldwork was led by Bri Patterson. Final reports for the park were written by Lisa Gilbert. Louise and Doug wrote the forest reports based on Patterson's field reports and notes.

• Sixteen park caves were completely inventoried for cultural resources, and nine were partially inventoried due to various limitations.

• Each of the park caves were given a preliminary recommendation of eligibility. Three park caves are considered eligible to the National Registry of Historic Places as part of the Dunkhani Archaeological District, and 12 remain unevaluated and are treated as eligible pending future evaluation.

• Cultural inventories were completed for most of the forest caves.

Climate

• Shiloh McCollum and Gretchen Baker led the team's climate studies.

• The project used long-term data loggers and handheld monitors.

• One of the most intriguing and potentially scientifically valuable resources are the perennial, paleo-ice deposits in three high-elevation caves in the park (See January 2025 NSS News.).

Hydrologic Resources

• Four caves serve as resurgence springs in this arid region, which greatly impact the local fauna both outside and inside the caves.

• The most interesting and important karst hydrologic feature is the Baker Creek Cave System, which was previously studied by Tom Aley of the Ozark Underground Laboratory. Aley demonstrated that sinking Baker Creek resurfaced both downstream in the Baker Creek drainage and also crossed the surface drainage divide to emerge in the Lehman Creek drainage. While not unusual in karst terrains throughout the world, this is very unusual in the arid West and important for land managers to understand in case of a hazardous waste spill upstream in Baker Creek.

Conclusions

This project has greatly expanded our knowledge about the previously little studied and documented caves in White Pine County, Nevada. The multi-disciplinary approach proved very successful, with extraordinary synergy between team members. We all became broader field scientists in the process and helped ensure each discipline's success.

Using the Great Basin Institute to handle personnel employment, housing, purchasing and vehicles dramatically enhanced the efficiency of the project and allowed the agency leaders to focus on the science and producing results. The tangible products of the project are given in 1,550 pages of reports, divided into detailed, comprehensive reports on all caves in both the park and the forest and much abridged "Manager's Reports" to facilitated overviews of each cave.

What's Next?

Our team made recommendations for future management policies and research needs based on the collected scientific data. Hopefully these recommendations will help guide the park and forest cave programs in the future. This project made reconnaissance-level reviews of the caves, and future work will likely be more focused. Many biological specimens await identification and study. Inventories of the invertebrates in the caves will not be considered complete without many more focused visits. While a good start was made of identifying the paleontological potential of all the caves, and several caves in the forest have proven treasure troves, a huge amount of potential paleo- work remains. We were unable to fully assess the cultural resources of many of the caves, and therefore this work should be completed. A geo-inventory was either not completed or, in a couple of caves, not attempted and will require a highly skilled geologist to complete. The abundance of mammillaries in the area and their proven antiquity suggest a lucrative tool for studying the tectonic history of the region. Perhaps the highest priority should be continued work on the paleo-ice as the information frozen in those deposits is likely to diminish every year as the mean annual temperature on the surface continues to rise.

Volunteers

The project greatly benefited from huge contributions of time and expertise from scientists and cavers. While a list of everyone who contributed would likely go on for many pages, major contributors were: Jaden Ackroyd, Josh Ackroyd, Greg Allen, Ian Ashby, Jerry Atkinson, Kat Blanco, Xero Castaneda, Larry Coats, Tim Coats, Donald G. Davis, Daniel DeBlanco, Mike Doe, Kathy DuChene, Harvey DuChene, Paul Dye, Hannah Elliott, Tom Evans, Bill Farr, Rafael Garcia, Carl Haken, Mark Hamalainen, Jeff Harrison, Marc Heins, John Horton, Jasen Hutchens, Kenneth Ingham, Sadie Iverson, Hannah Jackson, Karydis Johnson, Matt Lachniet, Guiseppe Lucia, Barbara Luke, Joyce Mak, John McLean, Leslie Melim, Amy Miecznikowski, Aria Mildice, Peter Miller, Joyce Mok, Diana Northup, Bryce Pollock, Doug Powell, Jessica Preston, Virginia Price, Merrilee Proffitt, Alan Rice, James Rice, Alyssa Richards, Dillon Roy, Katrina Smith, Peter Sprouse, Bern Szukalski, Carol Vesely, Matt Woodward, Jason Wurtz, and Brit Wylie.