A Little Caving to Start the Day - Ely, NV (Day 53)

Today had an interested start! To start with, there was a frantic, false wake up, because some people forgot to reset their clocks yesterday when we passed into Pacific time zone (woot! Last time zone!). However wake up was still extra late, because we stayed late in order to check out a guided tour of Lehman Caves in Great Basin National Park 5 miles up the road. We had an awesome tour of the caves and an awesome tour guide, Roberta. Roberta is herself a breast cancer survivor, and was very touched by our mission and purpose. She was also extremely impressed; she told us a story of a 60 mile walk she participated in once that was supposed to raise awareness for the challenge of dealing with breast cancer and joked that the walk was even harder than her struggle! The caves were beautiful, even though they were extremely damaged from years of tourists breaking stalactites and stalagmites (Roberta tought us all about all kinds of cave formations!). Lehman Caves are most famous for their rare Shield formations, but I think the beautiful curtains were my personal favorite.

It was a fun ride into Ely, we stopped at a neat roadside restaurant for our lunch stop where we left a signed dollar bill as a memento for them to add to their entire wall of signed dollar bills! When we finally arrived in Ely, we were welcomed by a free public BBQ across the street that we were kindly allowed to crash. It was an awareness and publicity effort for a new coal power plant they want to build 20 miles out of the city. After the BBQ and refreshing showers, a bunch of us checked out the local karaoke bar for a bit of fun before bed!

4K Lovin,
Anna E. S. Johnston