Wednesday the 24th

Today we met up with Alex Enna at the Lava Lands visitor center before our tour. Alex is the partnership program manager for the Deschutes National Forest. He said a lot of his work is setting up partnerships or securing funding and grants. These partnerships are very valuable as they get a lot of trail maintenance and vegetation management done. With around 2,000 volunteers doing about 50,000 hours of work each year, that is the equivalent of 20 full-time employees! We then got an amazing explanation about the lava flows in the area, the history of the volcanic activity, and a great little geology lesson from Christine Hughes, a park ranger at the visitor center. This helped us understand how the geology of the area changed over time and the major events that have occurred and shaped the landscape. Thanks to DiscoverNW who got us tickets to ride the shuttle to the top of Lava Butte, the hike would’ve been too much! There were absolutely amazing views up here and it was really nice to get to do just a cool fun thing where we were almost like tourists for the first time on this trip.


We then headed over to the Lava River cave where Karen Walsh gave us a great explanation of the species we could find in the cave and some fun bat facts. She also touched on the formation of the cave and the history of its use. It was formed around 75,000 years ago, is one mile long, and was used for storage by Native Americans. There are 14 native bats in Oregon, and all 14 can be found in the cave. They are currently worried about white nose syndrome which is a fungus killing bats. They get itchy during hibernation and wake up during winter and are unable to sustain themselves. Our guides in the cave were Cassidy and Skyler, who were two of the most knowledgeable people my age I have met recently, they were really impressive! While walking through the cave we got so much information on the specific formations, layers, vents, and overall structure within the cave from Cassidy and Skyler, and literally any question we had could be answered by them. I loved learning about the lavacicles (great name) which are similar to stalactites but from in lava caves and not limestone caves. We were also lucky enough to see both a translucent centipede and a male harvestman spider, which are both only found in this specific cave. Once our tour was over we made our way back to camp where we processed some of our soil samples, and Monette made an amazing Korean BBQ dinner.



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