Wind Cave: The World's First Cave National Park
The opening that gave Wind Cave its name is barely large enough to crawl through, a hole in the limestone in the southern Black Hills where air rushes in or out depending on the weather. When the barometric pressure outside is high, the cave breathes in. When it drops, the cave breathes out, sometimes hard enough to knock a hat off a visitor’s head. Settlers of the late nineteenth century told of hearing the wind whistling at the entrance, and the name stuck.
The cave had long been known to the Lakota and other Plains peoples, for whom the breathing hole carries deep meaning. In Lakota tradition the place is tied to emergence, the story of the people coming up into this world from below the ground. That association has given Wind Cave a standing that goes well beyond geology, and it is one reason the surrounding country has been treated with particular care.
European American settlers are usually credited with locating the entrance in the 1880s, drawn by the sound of the wind. Within a few years a family had taken up the work of exploring and showing the passages, guiding the curious through by candle and lantern. Early exploration was rough going. There were no developed trails, and visitors followed their guides through tight crawlways and over loose rock, trusting a flickering light and a length of string to find the way back.
A new kind of national park
In 1903 Congress set the area aside as Wind Cave National Park. It was the seventh national park established in the country and the first created to protect a cave. That was a notable shift in thinking. The earlier parks had been built around grand surface scenery, the geysers of Yellowstone or the cliffs of Yosemite. Wind Cave asked the public to value something it could not see from the road, an underground world whose worth lay in its scientific interest and its strangeness rather than in any sweeping vista.
What the cave protected was unusual even by the standards of caves. Wind Cave holds one of the world’s finest displays of boxwork, a delicate honeycomb of thin calcite fins that project from the walls and ceilings in interlocking blades. The fins formed along cracks in the rock and were left standing when the surrounding limestone dissolved away. Boxwork exists in other caves only in small amounts. At Wind Cave it covers whole rooms, and it remains the formation most associated with the place.
The passages themselves are a tangled three-dimensional maze packed into a relatively small footprint of ground. For more than a century, mappers have pushed the known extent of the cave steadily outward, and the surveyed length now runs to well over a hundred miles, making it one of the longest caves on the planet. Air-flow studies have long suggested that what has been mapped is only a fraction of what lies in the rock, a point Wind Cave shares with its neighbor to the west, Jewel Cave.
Above ground
The park is not only a cave. The land set aside on the surface became a refuge for the wildlife of the Hills and the prairie that meets them. Bison were reintroduced in the early years of the park, part of the same broad effort that rebuilt herds elsewhere in the region, and elk and pronghorn share the mixed-grass country. Prairie dog towns spread across the open ground, and the rolling transition between forest and grassland gives the surface a character distinct from the deep pine canyons farther north.
That mix of grassland and ponderosa pine sits along the southern edge of the Black Hills, not far from the bison range of Custer State Park. Visitors today can tour developed sections of the cave on lighted walkways, a long way from the candle-lit scrambles of the 1890s, though the natural entrance still breathes as it always has. The wind at the hole remains the simplest and most honest introduction to the place, a reminder that the small opening in the limestone connects to something vast and largely unseen below.
The early decision to protect a cave for its own sake looks ordinary now, when caves across the country draw steady streams of visitors. At the time it was a quiet argument that the value of a landscape could lie underground, in formations most people would never reach, and in the stories a place had carried long before any survey crew arrived.