Timpanogos Cave Field Trip

We hiked to Timpanogos Cave! I hadn't been here since I was a little girl. It was fun to take the school kids, and we were glad to leave the littlest ones at home because the hike is pretty steep (with sheer drops on the sides! A little girl fell off and died on this trail when Abe was a baby, and I have been scared to take kids here ever since!)

This turned out to be a sad day for me (I started miscarrying a baby on the drive home, though I was grateful the bleeding hadn't started as we were hiking😥) so I look at these pictures and feel sad. But we did have a fun time, and the cave is cool to see!

Some baby stalactites and stalagmites

Flowstone

Weird octopus-y hand things

Ziggy took a liking to the ranger who was our guide (I had told him that Park Rangers are kind of like policemen) and chatted to him companionably, asking lots of questions that the ranger didn't seem to quite want to engage with. To be fair, many were questions like "What if someone does touch part of the cave? Would they go to jail?" So maybe it's just as well.

Cool little helictites

Junie hugging her juniper friend

Crystals

I always love learning about crystals! It's so fascinating to watch them grow. We didn't make hot ice this time, sadly, because that's one of the best things to do. But we grew sugar crystals and left them in the solution for a lot longer than we've had the patience to before. So we got some nice big crystals.

They are so pretty!

We grew borax crystals too

Here we were attempting stalactites with epsom salts, but got more like…cave popcorn?

Still, lots of growth!

These are salt crystals (ideas for growing them here)

I love seeing the tiny cubes they make

And the pretty fern-like patterns!

We still have a lot of unbroken geodes from our last , so we broke one to see what crystals we could find inside!

The girls were very patient and didn't just smash the thing as we've done sometimes in the past, and it was worth it because it ended up splitting neatly in two:

like this!

Beautiful!

I love the group of big crystals within the matrix of tiny ones in this half of the geode!

Cave Unit Study and Activities

We started the school year off learning about Caves because I wanted something I knew would be engaging for Ziggy. There are some really fun field trips to go with caves and I just thought he would love the geology! And he did!

This unit lasted until Halloween so we got to do some fun Halloween tie-ins with bats also. Our previous Cave Unit can be found here (this went along with a trip to New Mexico and Carlsbad Caverns! I wish we could go there again!).

Some miscellaneous resources:

An interesting website: https://www.design42.com/caving/home.htm

Cool movie about The Deepest Cave

A short film about Carlsbad Caverns

Interesting film: Inside Hidden Caves

We also watched a good video called "Hidden Forests" which I can't find right now.

There's a Planet Earth section on Caves: (Season 1 Episode 4)

https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B09226TR6X/ref=aiv_DVAPI_watchlistToggle

I've always been fascinated by this giant crystal cave. They've learned a lot more about it since I first learned about it ten years ago in our first cave unit!

We learned about the Lascaux caves and other prehistoric cave art and did these "cave paintings" on paper bags. (Something like this.) We used chalk and crayons, and even burned the ends of some skewers so we could use "charcoal" like the ancient people did.

Gus and Clementine joined in too

Clementine (she looks so young here!) was very pleased with herself

Big kindergarten boy

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This was a little activity on dissolution when we were talking about how stalactites and stalagmites are formed. Ideas here:

Dissolving M&Ms and Amazing Solubility

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This was a fun activity (idea from here)—we put a soluble mineral (sugar cubes) under an insoluble mineral (clay) and dripped water through a small hole in the clay. The sugar dissolved in the water, leaving cavities underneath the clay.

We could see how some caves form in the sides of cliffs, and other areas form sinkholes beneath the ground level

Lots of little caverns here—I wish I could shrink myself and go in exploring!

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Best of all were the multitude of drawings of spelunkers Ziggy did during this unit! We watched some movies about cave divers and cave explorers and his imagination was really caught by that. He drew his poor little explorers squeezing through so many tight and winding caverns! (They didn't mind, though, because they were so prepared with lanterns, ropes, hooks, and so forth! And because they got to see so many wonders!)

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For our culminating activity of this unit, we decorated our trunk (for the ward Trunk or Treat) like a cave! We made stalactites and stalagmites, and hung bats from the ceiling. It looked cute, and we were rather proud of it…but then we saw a bunch of other amazing trunks other people had decorated and realized it was not quite as impressive as we'd thought. :) But we had fun making it all the same!