Bigfork students explore at cave camp

Dangling from a rope, Rhianyon Larson smiled as she tried to propel herself a few feet higher. She was hanging 10 feet off the ground from a pulley system at Camp Rotary in Monarch, near Great Falls. This day was only her second journey into a cave, and she was training to explore more in the future.

Larson eventually gave a sigh of defeat and climbed down, acknowledging that rope climbing requires a lot of work. But for the 14-year-old from Bigfork, the practice was worth it.

“I think it’s a lot of fun,” Larson said. “A lot of kids don’t get to do this and get to see a different part of the Earth. Really it’s a different world down there.”

Larson was one of more than 100 people — several from the Flathead Valley — who gathered in mid-October to learn about caving and the caverns of Montana.

The Northern Rocky Mountain Grotto, a caving group based in Montana, hosted its first Cave Camp event this year in conjunction with the annual cave cleanup, co-lead by the U.S. Forest Service and University of Montana Cave Club.

Among the attendees was the Bigfork High School Cave Club, of which Larson is a member. The Bigfork club brought 11 students and instructor Hans Bodenhamer.

Bodenhamer has been exploring caves since he was a teenager.

“I’ve been just obsessed with caves for years,” Bodenhamer said. He estimates he has been in more than 1,000 underground caverns in the last 40 years.

Bodenhamer is also passionate about mapping caves, but most recently his enthusiasm landed on conservation and sharing the experience with his students. Bodenhamer said he was reluctant to take students on a cave expedition as a teacher in Browning in 2005.

“I was cautious to include my hobby with my students,” Bodenhamer said. “I didn’t want to ruin my hobby.”

A few years later, Bodenhamer took a job at Bigfork High School and the kids got wind that he had a cool hobby. The students wanted a cave club, but school board trustees were reluctant because of safety concerns. Bodenhamer ultimately won them over with a simple argument: “It’s no more dangerous than football.”

SINCE THAT time the Bigfork Cave Club has included nearly 100 students who have worked to map 40 caves in Montana and 16 in Arizona. In recent years, Bodenhamer accepted the invitation to let the young cavers work with other groups and agencies, like the U.S. Forest Service and Glacier National Park.

“A lot of times they have projects that they have to put on the back burner; they just don’t have the people,” Bodenhamer said. “When we can go out and do these conservation projects, it’s a win-win situation for everyone.”

Those projects have recently included work to document bat habitats and monitor the possible progression of white-nose syndrome, a fatal disease that poses a serious threat to bat populations.

The disease has not yet been found in Montana. About a dozen new bat hibernacula, or dens, were found during the project. Students explored caves in the dead of winter, sometimes hitting temperatures of 20 below zero.

Some of the students involved in the projects have gone on to work for other agencies.

It is a different way of teaching students, Bodenhamer said.

“[Most schoolwork] gets kids involved in the textbook and the skills they develop are not real-world skills,” he said. “It’s finding answers in books and multiple choice.”

He added that students who don’t thrive in the classroom setting often do well at mapping caves, something he considers a worthwhile endeavor.

“I think that over the years the generations have kind of shifted away from an appreciation and engagement in nature and I think we are going to suffer as a greater society, because a lot of things are tied into how nature works,” Bodenhamer said. “I think it builds their appreciation for the natural world, and that’s really important.”

EACH PERSON who took part in the three-day camp had their own reasons for journeying into the underground darkness. Some were biologists with a keen interest in the bats, algae or other species that call the secluded abysses home. Others were geologists or hydrologists, curiously examining the rock and mineral formations carved from or fed by water beneath the surface.

But most were not scientists at all. They were just people intrigued by exploring hidden spaces in the forest.

Among the group was a grandmother from Helena who said she had been in many caves over the years and despite her recent knee problems, was still hoping to make a trek to an ice cave.

She was traveling with a mother and father who had their 4-month-old son in tow, fully intent on taking the infant beneath the ground with them. In another group, a 6-year-old gushed with excitement about the interesting mineral formations he saw as he was interviewed about his first caving expedition.

Katie Graham came from Calgary, Alberta, for the camp, along with three other members of the Alberta Speleological Society. Graham has been caving for 11 years.

“The world is very simple when you get underground,” Graham said.

Graham said she also found it exciting to go into areas where few had gone before, into a darkness that holds the unknown.

“There’s something really addictive about that,” she said.

Graham said she also had fun meeting other cavers, which is essential to finding new caves.

The caves are difficult to find without coordinates. The landforms are often unmarked with locations held closely by a caving community that tries to balance sharing the underground wonders with new respectful explorers and keeping the locations secret enough that the caves aren’t subject to high volumes of traffic that sometimes come with vandalism.

Bodenhamer said that most people, if taught how to properly care for the spaces, won’t damage them.

“Most of the time people will go to a cave without knowing any better,” Bodenhamer said. “I think most of the people, if you say they are pretty special places, they are nonrenewable resources, people will respect that.”

AT CAVE camp, people were set to explore the caves near Monarch filled with ice, 40-feet drops and pools of water. A caver almost always needs hardhats and headlamps, but also might need ropes and climbing gear, wet suits, ladders, or other equipment. The explorers can enjoy the caverns’ natural beauty or help contribute to understanding the underground environment by mapping or surveying the site.

Few emerged from the caves in pristine condition; instead, boots, coveralls and shirts were caked with mud.

Bodenhamer said the area with the highest density of caves in Montana is the Bob Marshall Wilderness.

The area is home to the Tears of the Turtle Cave, the deepest known cave in North America, discovered only a decade ago. Bodenhamer said there are some caves located in Glacier National Park and near the Flathead Valley, but that the area does not have as many caverns because glacial sedimentation made a poor environment for cave formation.

Anyone with an interest in caves can visit www.nrmg.org to learn more. More information about the Bigfork Cave Club can be found at www.bigforkhighschoolcaveclub.weebly.com.

The National Speleological Society (http://caves.org) also has a great number of resources available. The group’s 2018 conference will be held in Whitefish.

Reporter Megan Strickland can be reached at 758-4459 or mstrickland@dailyinterlake.com.