The dark days of Oregon Caves

STEP RIGHT UP. DUCK INTO THE DAMP, 42-DEGREE darkness and sidle this way. Mind the soda straws -- that’s what cavers call those small stalactites. Now you’re under the mountain, with three miles of marble-walled passages radiating around you, and a controversy spilling out of each vein.

In the empire of the National Park Service, these caverns are a modest outpost: They lie in a rural, blue-collar corner of Oregon, fewer than 10 miles north of the California border, get about 90,000 visitors a year and close every winter. But they have been through big changes since the day in 1874 when a hunter and his dog stumbled upon them.

Most tours follow a standard route, a path that includes more than 500 stair steps and enough tight squeezes to make a claustrophobe’s pulse go pitapat. It takes 90 minutes. Clammy breaths, napping bats, the tinkle of trickling water. In one of these dark corners, ranger Steve Bolton says, researchers found fossilized bear bones that might be 50,000 years old.

But what doesn’t come up on the public tour is dissent over management of the caves. For three years now, a pair of hard-core cavers, Jay Swofford and Bill Halliday, have been tussling with National Park Service officials over management of this resource. It’s a common problem for anybody who has ever had to balance recreation and preservation, and here, where a wayward breeze can destroy a millennium’s slow dripping, the challenge is deeper and darker than elsewhere.

Swofford, 40, a Eugene computer security consultant and founder of Friends of the Oregon Caves, led tours here in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s and may know this place better than anyone. Halliday, a 78-year-old Tennessee resident, mapped these caves in the 1960s. Their campaigning began in 2001, when the Park Service laid plans to start taking some visitors beyond the standard route to a more remote area in back.

Hand-wringing over these caves goes back to 1909, when President Taft declared this system a national monument and put the Forest Service in charge. In 1934 -- the same year a concessionaire put up a handsome six-story hotel, restaurant and gift shop -- the Park Service took over in a government reorganization. And for more than 60 years, it left the guiding in the hands of concessionaires, approved measures to get more tourists into the caves, and did little to stop visitors from pocketing souvenirs. Tens of thousands of Oregonians and Californians have fond memories of those hands-on visits, but the fractured formations they left behind still stand like rows of broken teeth.

Meanwhile, looking to ease the way for tourists in the 1930s, workers blasted a new exit tunnel, widened main passages, filled side passages with dislodged rubble. That changed air-flow patterns, destabilizing temperatures and scrambling the way formations had been growing.

During the following decades, the Park Service approved installation of an electrical system and switched on lights that caused the growth of algae, which turned parts of the cave from white to green. Workers poured an asphalt floor, and the Park Service still gave guides and visitors a long leash. As recently as 1997, a major formation called the Bird of Paradise vanished overnight, apparently stolen.

But in the 1990s, the Park Service pendulum swung at last. In a preservation effort, rangers added doors to stabilize wind patterns and temperatures. They yanked out tons of asphalt, from which petroleum was leaking, and displaced rubble. In place of the asphalt, they poured concrete. Fewer side effects, so far as we know. They set up a new lighting system that returns caves to darkness when visitors aren’t passing through and they started to spray the algae with bleach.

The biggest changes came in 2000 and 2001, when the Park Service beefed up staffing, let the old concessionaire’s contract lapse and took over tour operations for the first time. Craig Ackerman, Oregon Caves superintendent, has called this “a new chapter” in the caves’ history.

But Halliday and Swofford don’t want Ackerman in charge. In June’s National Speleological Society newsletter, Halliday and Swofford called for the Forest Service to take over the 480-acre site. They blamed the Park Service for “exaggeration and misinformation” about a cave system they say is smaller, less beautiful and more tourism-scarred than many others.

“What they’re doing is over-managing it in some ways and under-managing it in others,” says Halliday. Look at the brochure, he says: Here are images of a nonnative salamander and a bat species whose presence has not been confirmed. The monument’s chief of interpretation, Roger Brandt, acknowledges that an updating of the brochures has been delayed by budget considerations. But rangers say they have no interest in giving up the park, and no plans to mess with their current tour arrangements.

The caves may not be unique, they say, but the six types of rocks along the route offer a window on “one of the world’s most diverse geologic realms,” not to mention the notable population of endemic insects and those old bear bits. Swofford and Halliday, Brandt suggests, are so emotionally caught up in the place that it’s hard for them to watch anybody else run it.

Such wrangling is the nature of the ranger’s job if your natural wonder is damaged goods and its educational possibilities are as great as these caves’. You’re doomed to an eternity of arguable decisions. Keep offering tours? Sure. Now, where? How?

“This is very difficult terrain to navigate,” Brandt says.

Sure is. The more careful you get, the more closely your critics watch. That’s got to annoy a public servant. The very best thing for the caves, I’m beginning to think, would have been the disappearance of its discoverer in a sudden landslide at the moment of discovery. The dog, too. You can’t trust witnesses.

To e-mail Christopher Reynolds or to read his previous Wild West columns, go to latimes.com/chrisreynolds.