Nevada Basin Bears Treasure Underground Visitors To Isolated Lehman Caves See Rarest Of Formations

Want to buy a cheap ticket to another planet?

Lehman Caves in Great Basin Park on the Utah-Nevada border is as close as a visitor will come to stepping on Mars. Stooping, side-wiggling and squeezing through the long narrow passages between open caverns makes anyone feel like a space explorer.

Few visitors enter without being awed by a spectacular array of textures, contours, shapes and patterns underground.

Twenty-odd miles of jaw-dropping silence and beauty were carved from natural limestone starting more than 550 million years ago when most of Utah and Nevada were covered by a warm shallow sea.

Now, a wild world awaits, just $4 and three hours from the Salt Lake Valley. Lehman Caves are among the most “decorated” in the country. This is the truest cave experience a person can expect without being a full-blown spelunker.

Unlike the unending open spaces of such famous caves as New Mexico’s Carlsbad Caverns or the barren look of more mammoth caves elsewhere, visitors here will feel they are truly crawling through the Earth.

This is not a place for the claustrophobic. Tours lasting 60 to 90 minutes and running a half-mile underground are the norm. Big stalactites often connect to stalagmites on the floor by pencil-thin “straws.” Where two have touched for a long time, a massive column up to 24 feet long can be formed. Bizarre shields loom like solid stone satellite dishes. They are rare in caves, and Lehman has the highest concentration in the country with more than 300.

Elegant “drapery” hangs ceiling to floor in folds like giant chunks of whale baleen set in stone, forming frozen waterfalls of rock. Artificial light dramatizes everything in shadows. Coral-like helactites spider-web out like chaotic fingers from every fracture in the cave walls. Pools of water are so clear and filtered it is almost impossible to see them in a flashlight beam.

Lehman Caves were carved from limestone bedrock left by the ancient ocean when surface water mixed with decaying organic matter to form a weak carbonic acid. The weak acid ate its way through the limestone, leaving the big empty caves in place when the water table dropped.

The decorations are formed by seeping water, which carries tiny bits of dissolved limestone, which is in turn deposited when it hits the open air of the caves.

The caves are also decorated in less fortunate ways. Absalom Lehman discovered the caves in the spring of 1885. With typical 19th-century foresight, he took a sledgehammer and smashed his way through the delicate stalactite formations and soon after started charging admission.

The U.S. government took over in 1922.

Prohibitionists held “speakeasy” dances here. Cold War fallout shelters were built and weddings performed. Bright graffiti in some rooms of the cave looks as if it were laid down in crayon yesterday, despite being more than a century old in spots.

Ranger Liz Thoron enjoys taking visitors to the Inscription Room at the end of the developed walkway, where they react with disgust to all the graffiti on the ceiling.

“Have some understanding,” she says. “The walkway you came through was not developed in those days, and turn-of-the-century visitors had to come through there” - pointing to a wide, low opening with small sharp stalactite-mite teeth like the mouth of some deep sea monster.

A foot tall, it is only high enough for a belly crawl.

“And this is what they saw,” she says.

She kills the artificial lights, revealing a dingy yellow, shadowy primeval world with her crude candle-lantern.

For a final treat, the ranger blows out the candle. Blackness that exists inside a rock cloaks the room. It cannot be described. It is a whole new kind of darkness.

Now is the time to go. In July and August, tours sell out. Four tours are scheduled daily between 9 a.m. and 4:30 p.m. The Visitor’s Center is open from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

Cost is $4 for adults, $3 for ages 6 through 16, $2 for seniors and free for those 5 and under. During the summer, tickets can be bought up to 30 days in advance by calling (702) 234-7331, ext. 242.