Lewis and Clark Caverns State Park, MT

Saturday, June 17- 19
Lewis and Clark Caverns State Park, Whitehall, MT

What a beautiful part of the country! We really enjoyed the looooong 27 mile drive from our last campsite. . . rough day, beautiful scenery!

The snowy peaks in the distance emphasize how late spring arrives here, but our campsite is in a valley, so the snow disappears behind the closer mountains and we're surrounded by green slopes and trees with a few limestone outcrops and beautiful puffy clouds, and wind. . . lots of wind.

The campground is fairly spacious - laid out in five wagon wheels, so to speak. The area includes a tepee and three log cabins for rent for those who travel without an RV.

Many of the park amenities were developed by the CCC back in the 1930's, in fact, this was the first state park the CCC worked in. Montana later developed a state program of their own modeled after the national CCC.

Though they didn't discover them, the caves are named for the Lewis and Clark expedition that traveled down the Jefferson River, which runs right by this area.

The caves, or caverns, here are limestone structures, thousands, probably millions of years old. We decided on the short tour and met our tour guide at the upper visitor's center. Our group took a short but fairly steep walk uphill to the entrance to the cave, then traveled long dark tunnel, which serves as an airlock to protect the cave. Entering a second door we had our first look at the cavern structures. Beautiful!

We had a great tour guide, with a real gift for delivering the information and stories regarding the caverns, and we really enjoyed the history of the lineage of the cave's ownership, and the stories about the early explorers.

These formations really are beautiful examples of the limestone stalactite/stalagmite type of cavern, and the lighting was better than several of the caves we've visited, allowing for much better photography. It's a little on the pink side, as that's the spectrum their lights put out, but at least you can see what the structures look like.

It seems the Montana state parks system is something like 48th down on the list of national funding for their state park system, so they have a partnership with Americorp. Our guide was one of the Americorp  program volunteers. There are several in the park, and they help make up for the lack of regular rangers, which the state can't afford at this time.

In addition to the beautiful formations the caves are also famous for bats. They are the small brown type, and they don't come as far down in the cave as our tour took us, so we didn't see them. We are thankful for their presence anyway - they eat 1-2,000 bugs a night. Lovely to be by a river and have almost zero mosquitoes!

Monday, June 19
In the morning we took a jaunt up to Whitehall. It's really the closest town for services. There's a grocery store, gas station, etc. They've livened the place up a bit with a few murals but most of them are now badly faded. We found the pups a place to play ball on the way back to the campground, so their day was complete.

Downtown Whitehall, MT

We have to give the wind some credit for the bug free weather I think. By evening the wind had calmed down and we enjoyed sitting outside, basking in the sun and admiring the snowfall of cottonwood seeds. By evening the bugs began to come out of hiding.

Tomorrow we head south, working our way toward Nevada.

Lewis and Clark Caverns album here. Lots of cave photos in the album!