Field trips still rock

I believe most people who went to public school would agree that the best days were the ones on which we took field trips. Field trips were a break from the norm and despite our best efforts to just have fun and forget that we were at school, we still learned something.

Well, why would we home-schooling parents take that excitement away from our students? Field trips are still very cool and our children will learn a lot. Kids do learn best when they are having fun.

On a recent camping trip Nick and I took to Great Basin National Park, I took advantage of every educational opportunity (because I'm that way). We took the Lehman Caves tour (the longer 90-minute one) and had fun. The tour guide, of course, was filled with information about how the caves formed, the different kinds of formations you'll find in the caves, the life inside the caves and the recent human involvement.

The cool thing about Lehman Caves is the very rare shield formations. There are about 300 of them inside the caves. Also because there's minimal life inside the cave (the tour guide said the largest was a small scorpion) we could take lots of flash photography without disturbing any precious ecosystems.

So I came up with a pretty cool slideshow (and learned a lot about Garage Band and iMovie with this one) that I want to share. In a couple of the photos you will see what looks like black writing on the ceiling and some of the stalagmites are broken off. The black writing is actually old graffiti. Decades ago, people were allowed to take a tour all by themselves and they would take candles and burn their names or initials into the ceiling. They were also allowed to take souvenirs, so that's why many of the stalagmites were broken. We were told if we touched anything, we'd disrupt the continuing growth inside the caves because the oils on our hands would prevent water from flowing in that spot. We were also told that if we were caught touching anything, we'd be escorted out and talking to law enforcement agents.

When we were on our way back up, he asked us all to stand in this one area (where the previous tourists had burned their names into the ceiling) and asked us if we were at all nervous about standing 200 feet below the surface in a highly active earthquake area. None of us were until he mentioned that. Luckily, he put our fears to rest by saying when an earthquake hits an empty cavern underground, it doesn't cause everything to come crashing down. The waves just cause a loud echoing noise, which he demonstrated once we got back to the entrance.

If you live in the area or are visiting Eastern Nevada, I highly recommend taking the tour. They don't allow children under 5 to take the longer tour, probably because of the longer walk. Passages sometimes are very narrow and it would be extremely difficult to carry a tired child through the tour. They also recommend you buy tickets at least a day or more in advance in order to make sure you get the tour you want.