Wind Cave: Where the Earth Breathes

A few miles south of Custer lies a cave that does something no other natural feature around here does. It breathes. Air pressure differences between the cave interior and the surface cause air to flow through the cave's single small natural entrance, pushing out when barometric pressure drops outside, pulling in when pressure rises.

The effect at the entrance can be dramatic enough to blow a hat off a head. Wind Cave National Park was established on January ninth, nineteen oh three, becoming the sixth national park in the United States and the first cave in the world to be designated a national park. The cave now has more than one hundred sixty-eight miles of mapped passages, making it one of the longest and most complex cave systems on earth.

Geologists believe the mapped portion is only a fraction of the cave's full extent. Wind Cave is famous above all for its boxwork formations: thin blades of calcite that project from the walls and ceilings in a honeycomb pattern found almost nowhere else on earth. Approximately ninety-five percent of all the boxwork formations ever discovered in the world are in this one cave.

The Lakota people regard the cave as a sacred place, the origin point from which their ancestors emerged onto the surface of the earth. A young man named Tom Bingham stumbled across the natural entrance in eighteen eighty-one when wind blew his hat off. The cave was later explored commercially for several years before President Theodore Roosevelt signed the legislation making it a national park.