When it comes to cleaning lint in a cave, kids, such as Bronson Bishop, can fit in spots some adults can't/Lee Dalton

A couple of weeks ago, I had the privilege of joining a bunch of other good people for a brand new experience. I became a lint-picking troglodyte deep inside Lehman Cave in Great Basin National Park in Nevada.

“What the heck is that?” you ask. Let me explain.

Lint can float around before landing in caves, and where it lands can create damage down the road/Lee Dalton

We humans are an awfully untidy bunch. Everywhere we go, we leave behind traces of our passage. Ugly stuff. Yucky stuff. Dead skin cells. Shed strands of hair. Dirty footprints. Threads from our clothing. How often do we find ourselves forced to dust our living rooms? What do we find when we clean lint filters in our furnaces and clothes dryers?

Yup. That’s the gunk we’re talking about here.

Now try to imagine the impact on your humble home if you had 40,000 or so friends visiting and touring your house every year. Through the living room and kitchen; upstairs and down; a never-ending stream of people. Nice people. Clean people. But people just the same. All of them shedding little traces of their presence. You’d need a lot of Swifters to erase all that.

Two-year-old Eli Dimmick stayed close to mom during the lint cleaning operation/Lee Dalton

And just as happens at home, all that crud settles on cave formations the same way it does on our tables, chairs, and bookshelves. If the cave is active — if water carrying minerals is still building cave formations such as stalactites, stalagmites, columns, pillars, soda straws, helictites, shields, and all the other strange and wonderful things rangers show us underground — that layer of dust and fur disrupts mineral deposition and just makes the place look unkempt. Dirt tracked in on countless feet builds up where people step off walkways. Algae grows in places where electric lights chase darkness away.

Someone has to clean it. That’s where Lint Camp volunteers come in. Virtually all caves in our parks hold periodic camps, usually in winter when visitation is low. And that is how I wound up joining about 25 other good friends to pick lint, scrub rocks, vacuum stairs, and scrape years of boot dirt from cave floors in Lehman. Ours was the second of 2018’s two annual Lehman Lint Camps that happily managed to fit in between government shutdowns.

Cleaning up lint sometimes requires getting down and dirty in caves/Lee Dalton

We learned that it takes a heck of a lot of hard, grubby work to conserve Lehman Cave unimpaired for enjoyment of future generations.

Alan Rice came from Southern California; Glen from Las Vegas; Jennifer Parker and Steve Clagett flew down from Seattle; Ranger Julie Long started out in Ohio; the Bishop family and I came over from northern Utah. Ralph and Joy Smith are from Salina, Utah. Ralph’s retired from the U. S. Forest Service. (But he and Joy were still awfully good folks.) We ranged in age from 2 and still wearing diapers to me at the top edge of the age range with 3/4 of a century plus two under my bald head. Some other folks from the park wandered in and out, but it’s not easy to take notes in the dark and damp and I know I missed catching some names — so I apologize to all I’m missing here.

Only a few minutes of efforts provides proof that you're cleaning up the cave/Lee Dalton

We were led by Great Basin Rangers Gretchen Baker, Ben Roberts, Julie Long, and Annie Gilliland and a couple of park volunteers whose names I failed to write down. Along with them were also Alana Dimmick, whose husband Curt is normally chief ranger at Mount Rainier. He’s in Great Basin serving as acting superintendent for a time. Alana brought their kids, Eli and Riley, who are 8 and 6 and 2-year-old Isaac. Isaac wasn’t quite sure what it was all about, but Eli and sister Riley became experts at scrubbing mud from rocks to make the cave’s floor white again. I was delighted to discover that the NPS is still very much a family operation.

And along with Jon and Kerri Bishop’s two kids, Bronson and Miranda, who are 12 and 9 and in their second Lint Camp, the smaller Dimmicks were able to fit into places where adults couldn’t go. Those kids were hard working wonders.

Graffiti from years gone past still can be found in the cave/Lee Dalton

I can testify that if I hadn’t been wearing a hard hat, I’d have come home with at least 110 stitches in my head — and I heard a lot of other hats colliding with low ceilings. There were some moans and groans as we crawled and shuffled and bent and twisted to fit into some strange contortions as we used paint brushes and dustpans and even surgical tweezers. Every once in awhile you’d hear someone exclaim, “Wow! Look at the size of this furball!” The trophy hair was nearly ten inches long. The longest I found was only six.

I’m not at all uncomfortable underground or in tight spaces. But I do have to confess that it was more than just a little eerie when I left the cave all alone and returned one time to go get some things we needed down there. It wasn’t exactly frightening, but it made me aware that my puny little headlamp wasn’t much match for pitch blackness, especially when I was traversing a few hundred feet of silent cave where the lighting system had failed for some unknown reason. The park’s crew has been trying hard to find the trouble’s source and when I left after camp, Alan Rice, who is a caver hobbyist and in real life an electrical engineer, was working with them to try to find the problem.

Cleaning lint from the cave is no small task/Lee Dalton

The park made housing available for us in the dormitory that’s normally used for summer seasonals. I set my portable motel up in the dorm parking lot to make room for more inside the building. The kitchen and dining room hosted a Tuesday evening pot luck supper that was as much fun as it was delicious. Bronson discovered a treasure trove of old VHS movie tapes and spent almost all the time when he wasn’t in the cave watching Clint Eastwood. Most of the adults hung around the kitchen swapping tales and becoming acquainted.

Gretchen and Ben work in resource management at the park. Both are cavers and active members of the National Speleological Society. Gretchen first came to Great Basin as a new ranger 18 years ago and married a local rancher. She was there Tuesday evening with her delightful flock of kidlets who joined Miranda Bishop for what sounded like a rousing game of hide-and-seek up and down the dorm’s hallway. Ben has been there for something like 16 years. I was struck again by the realization that it’s people like these two who are examples of those nameless faceless unelected bureaucrats who actually keep our government operating reasonably smoothly while power players at the top single them out as they play their pathetic games of political pandering when they need someone at election time to blame after they’ve screwed things up again.

Then there was the freezing half hour or so after the potluck when Glen, the young man from Las Vegas, took us into the parking lot under Great Basin’s international dark sky to use his green laser and knowledge of astronomy to teach us a little about the universe around us. I discovered that one of my favorite places in the sky — those bright stars we call Pleiades — are called "Subaru" in Japan. Hence the stars on the back of every Subaru on our highways.

Even the acting superintendent's son, Issac Dimmick, got in on cleaning up lint/Lee Dalton

On top of all the fun and good fellowship, we also enjoyed special trips into parts of Lehman Cave that normal people don’t usually get to see. Thursday afternoon, Ben, Gretchen, and Julie led us on a challenging scramble to Talus Room and showed us where some 60 tons of cement and asphalt pavement had been carried out in five gallon buckets several years ago after rockfalls from the ceiling forced closure of that area. I want especially to thank Ben for his encouragement when I confessed worry that my decrepit old-age balance problems might hold others up. He was patient and even promised to pack me out if needed. For those with more energy than I had left on Thursday, Ben, and Gretchen led them to some of the other caves inside Great Basin’s boundaries.

I’m sure I’m safe to speak for the others, too, when I say that I haven’t had so much fun in a very long time. It was a bit sad to leave at the end of our three days. We were all tired out, but the last words we heard from each other sounded something like: “I’ll be looking forward to seeing you again next February.”

So friends of Traveler, if you would like to sign up next winter to become a lint-picking troglodyte at Lehman or perhaps another cave somewhere in another park, get busy and start looking for a spot. Just be ready to work really hard and get very muddy.

There is time to take a break to examine some of the historic graffiti in the cave/Lee Dalton