Lehman Caves, Ranch, Monument, Park

Absalom Lehman was an Ohio-born miner who had worked the California Gold Rush, tried his luck in Australia, and eventually settled in Snake Valley in the eighteen sixties, running a ranch in the shadow of Wheeler Peak. By most accounts, he discovered the cave around eighteen eighty-three or eighteen eighty-five, when his horse broke through a soft section of ground or when he noticed cool air seeping from a crack in the hillside. Accounts vary on the exact moment. What is consistent is what came next: he went inside, and what he found was extraordinary.

The cave forms in ancient limestone and marble dating to the Cambrian period, more than five hundred million years old. The chambers are filled with calcite formations that grew from dripping and seeping groundwater over millions of years: stalactites hanging from the ceiling, stalagmites rising from the floor, cave pearls, flowstone, popcorn formations coating the walls. What distinguishes Lehman Caves from most American caverns is the shields. More than three hundred shield formations have been documented here, large, flat discs of calcite that project from the cave walls at odd angles, sometimes with stalactites hanging from their lower edges. Most caves have one or two shields. A cave with dozens is unusual. Lehman Caves has more than three hundred. No one has fully explained why.

Absalom Lehman was guiding tours within a year of his discovery, charging roughly fifty cents per person. He died in eighteen ninety-one, before achieving the recognition he was working toward. President Warren G. Harding declared the cave a national monument in January nineteen twenty-two. In nineteen thirty-three the monument passed to the National Park Service, and in nineteen thirty-four the Civilian Conservation Corps arrived and set up a work camp. Their most significant project was drilling a permanent access tunnel into the cave, completed in nineteen thirty-eight and nineteen thirty-nine. Electric lighting followed in nineteen forty-one. The park rangers who lead tours today still walk Lehman's original route in a landscape shaped by federal New Deal labor.