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Day 36: Niagara Cave and Blue Mounds Campground (Minnesota)

Blasting past traditional expectations, there have been many things that have excelled not because they met up with typical standards, but because they found other ways to excell. When Las Vegas was dragging by catering only to the gamblers, they opened their services up to be family friendly. When Dodge fell behind in the sports car market while Ford had it’s Mustang and Chevy had it’s Corvette, they developed the Dodge Stealth, and later the incredibly prestigious Dodge Viper. Midwest airlines (now Frontier airlines) stood out from the pack by offering more comfortable seats and warm chocolate chip cookies. Every successful business evaluates what they have to offer and promotes that aspect. Today I visited two natural resources, each that have successfully used the resources they have to cater to their consumer.
Niagara Cave is located in the Southeast of Minnesota, near a small town called Harmony. It was discovered when a couple pigs went missing through a small sink hole, and was opened for tours later after some cavers negotiated the land use with the farmer. Niagara Cave isn’t highly decorated with speleothems, but it’s very tall, canyon-like passages actually encompass a full 4 geologic formations. Three of them you experience up close on the tour, and a fourth lays at the bottom of a stream at the end of the tour.

A trilobite in Niagara Cave of Harmony, MN. June 13, 2011

The passages can be enormously tall, at one point we were standing 150′ below ground, the cave being a full 110 feet tall (leaving only 40 feet of rock and soil between the passage and the surface). The limestones are full of fossils, ranging from gastropods to cephalapods to sponges and trilobites. Many of them you can see up close on the tour and I was able to get some decent pictures of them.

The tall, canyon-like passageways of Niagara Cave in Harmony, MN

While I prefer to see dense forests of speleothem development in caves, Niagara Cave was a real treat because of it’s tall, narrow passages. They light the areas smartly, showing off the nature of this cave as the passages follow the natural jointing in the limestones. The cave is privately owned, but it is obvious that the owners pride themselves in keeping the tours educational and as accurate as possible. My tour guide was informative, and everyone at the place seemed to know what formations and ages the cave was within off the top of their heads.

Niagara Cave- My tour guide for scale. Harmony, MN June 13, 2011

After my tour of Niagara Cave I decided to head as far West as i could to make my drive shorter. I had picked up a state park guide from the Minnesota welcome center and put my target on Blue Mounds State Park in the Western portion of the state. It had a big buffalo neat to the description, so it seemed like a good place to be. I love those fuzzy bovines.
Blue Mounds State Park turned out to be a real gem. The park has a lot to offer, sitting in the high prairie  with ranged of bison, but probably seemed a little lack luster to the campsites nearby that boast sites like the Badlands, the mountains and other wonders. They have done wonderful things to make the park even more attractive. First, it has many handicap-accessible campsites and bathrooms/showers. The fire pits are in great shape, and every campsite is incredibly clean. The best part, I have to say, is probably the shower house.

Check out the shower- It is even handicap accessible, having two shower heads, one at the height for a wheelchair. Blue Mounds S.P. Minnesota.

Every shower is in it’s own, lockable room- Which is wonderful for someone like me who is traveling alone and has some serious security issues. I hate feeling like some punk kid might be trying to grab my stuff from the bench outside my shower curtain. These showers alleviate this stress. They also have sky lights to cut down on lighting costs, the lights are on a sensor, the shower is a water saver as it is a button that you push that gives you a little over a minute of water at a time, and it is clean and nicely decorated with cedar wood.
I was smart enough to pack up camp before I took my shower, because a severe thunderstorm rolled through the area right as I finished showering. I decided to hang out in my shower room for a while, knowing the camp was near empty and I wouldn’t be inconveniencing anyone, and needing to charge my camera battery and phone in the outlet. The storm was mighty outside, and even made the water in the shower turn on all by itself when it struck something nearby, but the shower room was comfortable.

My shower room at Blue Mounds S.P. I had a toilet, a sink, an outlet, and a shower all to myself in one lockable room. Waiting out the storm.

It was actually hard for me to leave Blue Mounds State Park campground, but today I would be heading to the western limits of South Dakota to Custer State Park, when two friends of mine would be meeting up with me tomorrow morning. Ahh, the big open west where you can see miles of uninterruppted wilderness- and some company to make it even better.
-Nicole

One of the few speleothems in Niagara Cave: A bell. Harmony, MN June 13, 2011
A fossil in Niagara Cave. Harmony, Mn. How many of you can identify it?
Speleothems in Niagara Cave. Draperies. Harmony, Mn June 13, 2011
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The La Brea “Tar Pits”-Where History and Modern Science Meet

A person can put themselves back in the same place, with the same people and even the same time of year but you can not recreate a memory. You can find small things that bring back those memories but the world is an ever-changing place, constantly in motion. Times like these, where you try to immerse yourself back into your past, are when you realize that not only have you changed as you grew older, but so has the rest of the world.

Have you ever had a favorite movie as a young child that you went to re-watch as an adult only to find out it was much better in memory than in reality? If so, you will know what my day at the La Brea Tar Pits was like. Don’t get me wrong, it was still a great place to visit. It was just incredibly different than I remember as a child.

I was probably about 5 years old when my Aunt took me to the La Brea Tar Pits (Official Site) for the first time. The memories I have of the visit are a bit patchy, but here is what I do remember: Walking past the gated tar pits into the museum, looking at dinosaur statues, feeling the sample piece of “dinosaur skin” to see what scientists thought their skin felt like, and at the end she bought me a triceratops figurine and a photo slide.

Today the only thing that was familiar were the gated tar pits themselves. Political correctness and the evolution of scientific theory have changed the landscape of the museum in an entirety. There are no dinosaur statues in the museum, and with that the plaque of “dino skin” I wanted to touch again out of nostalgia was no longer in existence.

Here’s where the lesson in science comes in for all of you folks. No dinosaurs were EVER found at the La Brea Tar Pits. Considering the tar pits were formed well after the extinction of dinosaurs it would be impossible for this to occur unless someone decided to dig up some remains and dump them in the pits thousands of years later.

Most of the skeletons found in the tar pits are from the ice age, but the tar pits continue to ensnare small animals and bugs today. What you have pictured in your mind of the tar pits is probably inaccurate. It actually looks much like a big pond of water with some surface oil, much like a puddle in an urban street. Methane bubbles periodically work their way to the surface, making it look like a dying Jacuzzi tub.

Inside Page Museum at La Brea (yes, La Brea Tar Pits is actually quite redundant, seeing as “Brea” means Tar you are saying “The Tar Tar Pits”), there are numerous skeletons from thousands of years. One of the more numerous skeletons found in the pits is the Dire Wolf. They have a wall covered in their skulls, and these are only a portion of what they have found.


Some of the scientists here work in a literal fish bowl, just like you see in the first Jurassic Park movie. Walking around the back side of the museum you will come to the Paleontology Laboratory, which juts out into the room with a full-glass semi-circular build. The scientists work quietly inside, able to see everyone that mills around watching them tediously separate microfossils from minerals and sediment. It must take a lot of nerve to work under those conditions and I imagine they take turns sitting in the “fish bowl”.

After my brother and I finished the tour of the museum we walked around the ‘pond’ out front that has the mammoth statues tragically stuck in the ‘tar’. Around the walk are some art pieces, one of which looks like spare parts of a construction site. They are simply four concrete boxes. One of those pieces that starts the argument, between my brother and I, over whether art is the product or the intention of the artist’s talents. As we step down to cross the street I notice that tar has bubbled up through the street. Makes roadwork easy I laugh with my brother.

We try to go to Trader Joe’s to get another piece of my childhood memories: Fruit Leather. When I was young my parents used to pick up the fruit leather from Trader Joes for us to snack on. Once again my memoirs were blocked by time and reality: the parking lots were small, crowded, and full. No parking and there were several cars sharking around for spots just as I was. I decided that the fruit leather would have to wait and we headed back to my brother’s home city.

The drive home was through the mist that had remained throughout the day, the sun hiding behind the clouds. The memories I have of living in California mostly involve sunshine, or very windy days where we wore what was called a “windbreaker”, or in Midwestern talk, a light jacket. I don’t clearly remember any rainy or misty days from my childhood, probably because they were spent doing things of no monumental value, like playing legos inside or watching “Oprah” with my Mom.

The mist isn’t unpleasant at all, in fact it’s warm enough that with a jacket the weather is really nice. Comparable to a spring rain in the temperate regions. My Dodge Stealth still looked clean, mismatched wheel and all.

Yet again that I am reminded that memories are not only selective, but they are exactly that: memories.

A person can put themselves back in the same place, with the same people and even the same time of year but you can not recreate a memory. You can find small things that bring back those memories but the world is an ever-changing place, constantly in motion. Times like these, where you try to immerse yourself back into your past, are when you realize that not only have you changed as you grew older, but so has the rest of the world.

And it is in times like these that you realize something important you may have overlooked. For you to continue succeeding in life it is ok to change paths. When you can’t see a dinosaur exhibit, enjoy the comedy of the “fish bowl” scientists and the fascinating numbers of the Dire Wolves that were found in this little piece of Los Angeles.

The Dinosaur exhibit will always be a part of you, and it’s the reason you stepped into the next phase of life. It inspired you to learn something new and continue moving forward.

There is a lot in this world to see, and I have planned to see as much as I can of it, but there is a small factor that I continue to forget: the factor of time. I can take a picture of the world and try to see all of it as it existed in that picture, but I will never truly see all of the world.

To be a well rounded person I truly believe you have to experience the most of the universe as possible, and that’s what I try to attempt in my life. I may only be able to see the “dino skin” exhibit when I’m 6 years old, and the Dire Wolf collection at the age of 25, but every piece that I add to my collection of memories is going to be there forever. In another 20 years, perhaps, I will return in search for the memories of this misty day in Los Angeles and the bubbly waters of La Brea only to discover something new.

Remember: The memories last forever, and the new ones should be cherished just as much as the old.