6-24-26 Deschutes Lava Lands visitor and Lava River Tube

Today we woke up and got ready as per usual and we got ready to, as Jessica said, “be tourists”. We all had to hurry a bit to make lunches and grab something to eat really quick because we wanted to leave early to make sure we got there to listen to Christine give us her quick lesson and so we could have enough time to tour the museum ourselves before we took a bus ride to the top of the cinder cone we would talk about.

We left here early and we went to the Lava Lands visitor center to meet with Alex Enna, before we really walked around or anything we sat to listen to Alex tell us about himself. He said he is a Partnership Manager and that he kind of oversees the burning, thinning, and other things for the fire management I think and that he has 50,000 hours of volunteer work. He’s done trail management; he was a firefighter for 20 years before trail management he did the fuels program. Then we met Christine Hughes, who has been a ranger for about two months at the Deschutes National Forest.

I think of the quote she mentioned, "Geology is the Earth telling us a story" and she told us about the different kinds of rock formations that they have there at the Caldera, and this one has about 12 1/2 miles of activity when this one blew it made lava tubes that we also visited. She had these rocks that are all around this caldera and she got to tell us about them, the one I think of that she passed around is a cinder rock and it is very red from my perspective and it has more gas and has holes all over it. She said that there are 430 craters/volcanoes and that when this one blew it was shooting fire and magma about 1500 feet into the air, which is the next rock we talked about that spins around in circles in the air when it comes down and it holds it formation. When she introduced the next rock she called it the "rockstar of all rocks" which is obsidian, which I don't know if anyone realizes was like currency for Native Americans and they used it as currency kind of, so they were trading it to other people in what are now different states for things in exchange like pelts of animals and stuff. Then we talked about the pumice rock, which is crazy light and it has a little bit of iron, she said this is like the mentos in the mentos and Coca-Cola challenge, it shoots up and goes flying and the obsidian is like the Coca-Cola. 

We then went to the place I have been and was looking forward to this whole trip, the Lava River Cave. We met with Karen Walsh who was actually at the Visitor center with us, but this time we also met Cassidy and Skyler who just started working there not to long before. Cassidy told us that she was a social work intern and went to University of Montana and said she taught kids about the environment and stuff. There was this family there with us as well that wanted to tour the tube before they left here so they also introduced themselves. After everyone talked a bit and we introduced ourselves Karen got to talk about herself a bit, she said that she used to live in Michigan and did Botany, then she went back to work at Michigan and she was a botanist for the Midwest so when she moved this way it was a big difference for her and she didn't know to much about botany here because of the differences. 

We talked about the tube a bit and Karen said that the tube itself is 1 mile long to then end and one mile back, there are 182 stairs down so 182 back up. They close late September and open back up in May, this tube is a bat nursery or hibernaculum and they have 14 different species of bats, they identify them by their chirps. We also needed to talk about White Nose Syndrome because at the time we went there shouldn't be bats but if they were they would be sick so they wanted us to be aware of that and if we saw any to let them know because they would have a wildlife biologist come in since they would be sick or something. 

We were informed that there could be a Harvestman Spider or this centipede that we could possibly find in the tube itself, but it took a long time to try to find one. The Harvestman spider was named after a local man who found and studied it I believe, Neil Marchington. We then went down the cave and we found out quick that it was a vast difference from being up top because it also had a major part of it under the highway we just drove, but even down that far you can't hear it at all. I hope anyone reading has enjoyed following this trip with the students and the mentors and obviously all the people we have met along the way, and that you are staying hydrated.  

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