Mammoth Crystal Cave Preserve
KEY STATS
Meade County, South Dakota
2021
3.76 miles
Bethlehem Cave was the first tourist cave in the Black Hills of South Dakota – discovered in 1885 and operated commercially as Mammoth Crystal Cave from 1891 to 1952. This multi-mile cave is located north of Rapid City, SD, near a community called Tilford. Tourists came to this cave on a rail line that took them up Dry Elk Creek Canyon, where they were stationed below the cave prior to traversing up the steep canyon walls. Mammoth Crystal was the biggest ‘crystal’ cave in the region for nearly 70 years, until Herb and Jan Conn began mapping Jewel Cave. In the years following its opening for tours and initial mapping, many other show cave operations opened, attempting to capitalize on Bethlehem’s regional fame. Since the first survey attempt in 1935, the cave has had at least five different efforts to complete a full map, with only the map by Mike Hanson successful until resurvey efforts by the Paha Sapa Grotto in 2020.
Many of the Black Hills caves are characterized by calcite spar coating covering the cave walls and a network of interconnecting maze passage that often consists of a fair amount of crawling. Similarly, other long, local caves such as Stagebarn Crystal, Diamond Crystal, and Sitting Bull Crystal Caves all capitalized on this trend. The overabundance of similarly named caves led to this cave changing its name first to “Old Crystal Cave” and finally to “Bethlehem Cave.” Eventually, however,the cave’s relative remoteness, more than its name, likely led to it ending show cave operations indefinitely.
Bethlehem Cave is on the rim of an impressive limestone canyon, and the view from the cave entrance is the finest of any in the Black Hills. The canyon has several other small caves, four of which are within 100 yards of the entrance to Bethlehem, the largest of which is Columban Crystal Cave. Upon entering the cave, you immediately find yourself in the "Shrine Room," which has a small altar and seating area with electric lighting and a set of stairs leading out of the room. The "North Star Stair" is no longer a valid egress from the cave, but the ship-ladder stairs are still interesting. From the Shrine Room, one passageway leads out which will take you down the old tour route. This route, in a short distance, comes to an intersection, one way will take you through a door into the cave, the other into the home of the cave's on-site caretaker. Once traveling through this door, the passageway has been largely altered to allow for easier travel, avoiding the passageway called "Fat Man's Misery."
The cave tour continues through a series of small corridors of differing sizes until you pop out into "Poverty Flats," a very wide room with a ceiling height of around seven feet. At this junction, going left will take you to the beginning of the recreational route called the "Poker Chip" route and the majority of the northern section of the cave. A set of stairs in this direction will lead you down the tour route to "Notre Dame," a large room with crystal-coated boxwork. If you turn left at the Poverty Flats junction, it will lead you on the most direct route to The Lakes. The Lakes section of the cave contains large flowstone formations, pools of water, and was the draw of the old tour operations.
General travel in Bethlehem is very easy compared to other caves in the Black Hills. When going to any destination, there will be interspersed walking and crawling, but the vast majority of travel is walking. There are also a few large drop-offs, but the cave would best be described as "friendly." Immediately upon entering the cave, any visitor will notice that nearly every surface is coated in spar. These crystal surfaces make the cave beautiful but can make the cave uncomfortable without thick knee pads and gloves.
Where Elk Creek Canyon cuts through the Madison Limestone in the northeastern Black Hills of South Dakota, many small crystal-lined caves are clustered on the East side of the canyon. This cluster of caves most likely inspired 1876 pioneers to call this the Crystal Cave area. It was here that brothers Adolphus C. and Charles Frederick McBride discovered a crystal-lined room near the rim of the canyon while on a mining excursion. The McBrides returned and followed distinctive breezes at the back of the first room, breaking through to a passage leading to "Fat Man's Misery." They decided to settle on this land, claiming four 40-acre plots of land encompassing the cave entrance, building a small cabin and blazing in a wagon road up the canyon. As ranchers, they found time to explore the cave each winter and subsequently found the "Lakes Region" in the winter of 1889-90, remarking on the enchanting beauty of this portion of the cave in the local newspaper. This section is still the lowest portion of the cave today.
While there is some historical discrepancy on accounts of the chronology of the next events, the next two years were certainly full of intrigue surrounding the cave. A narrow-gauge railroad line was started from the city of Lead, down the canyon. The ability to easily bring people to the canyon, and new discoveries, led to A.C. McBride opening the cave for "public show" by the spring of 1890. It was common practice for the McBrides to allow visitors to take crystal "specimens" with them as a portion of these public visits. The perceived value of this enterprise, and the crystal within, led to multiple mining claims being filed for the area adjacent to the McBride claim. The most notable of these is the "Dog Tooth Spar Lode" claim, which fell on top of the cave.
By September 1891, these multiple claims came together. Under the leadership of Jacob G. Keith and Frank T. Allabaugh, they brought court action in Deadwood, preventing the McBrides from entering these claims (including cave passages under them) and re-questing accounting and payment for "valuable deposits and minerals removed." This court injunction halted entrance to this area by the McBrides and their operations. It also temporarily disrupted the ability of the public to visit the cave and allowed Keith and Allabaugh to mine a new entrance shaft from the surface, bypassing the entrance owned by McBride. This shaft, into what was then known as the "Lion's Room," was a permanent change to the cave and can still be seen in the first large room of the cave, now known as the "Shrine Room." This second entrance allowed Keith and Allabaugh to fully exploit the cave, as well as the newly completed rail-line, and they continued to develop the cave for public visitation.
From 1892 to mid-1894, Keith and Allabaugh controlled the cave. Visitors could ride the Black Hills and Fort Pierce Rail-line to the cave from either Piedmont or Lead. These train routes were paired with formal guided cave tours. During this period, large plans were made to build a resort hotel on-site and to have 150 electric lights installed in the cave. While Kieth and Allabaugh did not realize these plans, they continued hosting tours to increasingly large groups and continued collecting specimens from the cave for display. Keith and Allabaugh were entrepreneurs and marketers, proclaiming that the cave has "thousands of chambers, 10 miles of passage, and 27 varieties of crystal." The most prominent example of this marketing was the creation of a "model cave" at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
They created a "miniature cave" in a sixty-by-eighty-foot space under the floor of the Horticultural Building, divided into seven rooms connected by passages -- and electrically lighted with 100 bulbs. This was said to be decorated with "300,000 lbs. ... of stalactites, stalagmites, onyx, geodic crystals, dogtooth spar, and sparkling botryoidal masses; of cave pearls, flos Ferri, aragonite and drip-stone stained by oxidation in as many colors as the rainbow" which had been "patiently cut out of the rock" so as to "not mar or rob the cave of its embellishments" They made a small fortune from their five-cent admission charge and the sale of specimens during and after the Fair.
With the enterprise's success at Crystal Cave being touted in the papers and the tour business continuing to grow, taking trainloads of visitors for candlelit tours, the McBrides were sidelined, watching their discovery be destroyed. Making others rich. In mid-1894, a jury trial found that A.C. and C.F. McBride were entitled to over $400 in legal costs to pay the litigants who had brought action in 1891. Eventually, the county sheriff sold the Dog Tooth Spar claims to pay these judgments. After this, Keith and Allabaugh did not return to the cave but continued to display their fake cave on tour around the world, charging 5-10 cents for entry. The cave was finally back in the hands of the McBrides, but the damage had already been done. Although we are unsure what formations were taken, or the exact location of them, at least 2 train cars of formations were forever removed from the cave.
The McBrides, picked up where they had left off, exploring the cave! The "World's Fair Grounds" and "Diamond Fields" were discovered in the early to middle 1890s though the latter wasn't opened as a trail until later in the decade; the "Klondike" was discovered in 1898, and "Further Klondike" in 1900 (Johnson, 1919). This completed the discoveries of the formal tour routes in the cave: The Lakes, The Klondike, Further Klondike, World's Fair Grounds, and the Diamond Fields. This was a golden era for the cave and the business, with large amounts of exploration. The McBrides even attended the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo and the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis to publicize the cave.
In 1902, the "great flood" destroyed the rail line in the canyon, forever ending train rides to the cave. The McBrides built a 5-mile road to the cave to allow the business to continue. This road is now known as Bethlehem Road, and although the US Forest Service has allowed it to fall into disrepair, it is still the fastest route to the cave from Rapid City. In 1905, the official land survey made the ownership of the cave questionable. This led to another legal battle over the property, and the McBrides moved away for 9 years, waiting for the legality of the cave's ownership to be finally settled. This 9-year time period was the second period of intense damage to the cave, with an additional round of formation theft, destruction, and vandalism. Finally, in 1913, the matter was settled and the McBrides returned, making improvements to the land, road, and tour routes. Tours resumed in 1913.
In 1919, J. Harlan Johnson submitted his bachelor's thesis describing Crystal Cave and its mineralogy. This was, to that point, the most thorough study of a cave in the Black Hills. This produced the first line-plot map of the cave, showing all of the major routes in the cave. This same year a real-estate investor named Loui Storm visited the cave. Loui saw the potential to grow the business and planned to purchase the cave from McBride. The two jointly operated it until the early 1920s.
Loui was responsible for many of the changes in the cave through the next many years. He focused the tour experience from 5 routes to concentrate on the Lakes Route that continued for the rest of the cave's history as a commercial cave. He made this more accessible by adding ladders, stairs, enlarging passages, and eventually adding electric lights. Success in the twenties and thirties was such that other commercial caves incorporated "crystal" into their names in the sincerest form of flattery and sometimes colloquially used the Crystal name alone -- even to this day.
In the early 1930s, a handbill for the "only original Crystal Cave" advertised trips every half-hour (still at any hour, day or night) for only 40 cents for adults and free for children. The handbill also highlighted a new light plant to illuminate the cave, a graveled road from the highway, and a free crystal souvenir to every visitor. On the back side, appropriately, were the somewhat exaggerated boasts common to the industry: "1500 crystal rooms ... so large that some of the much-advertised little caves in the Hills could be stored away in the Crystal Cave rooms ... the largest petrified fish found... 50 miles of explored rooms, 22 miles of paths, and the most spectacular cave entrance in the United States". The cave was a successful business for Storm, and he continued to manage it until 1957.
As Storm grew older, he looked back to his roots and became a deeply religious man. In 1952, he gave the cave and surrounding property as a gift to the Conception Abbey, Order of St. Benedict, of the Catholic Church. The transfer stipulated that a monastic community be established on the grounds and permitted him to live there the rest of his life. When the church began its role as manager in 1957, Father Gilbert immediately built the Shrine of the Nativity in the first room in the cave and changed the name to BETHLEHEM CAVE. To this day, Storm and his wife Anna are entombed in a mausoleum on the grounds near the cave entrance.
The sixties brought more development at Bethlehem and greatly increased the study of the cave. A lookout ledge was blasted at the natural entrance, which exposed Columban Crystal Cave early in the decade. In 1972, Paha Sapa Grotto members Dave and Martin Springhetti, Carole Loskot, Karl Martin, and Mert Bowman visited the cave and were guided on an off-trail tour. As club members wished to turn their primary attention from Reed's Cave to others in the region, they volunteered to survey and map Bethlehem Cave. Mark Stock, Lester Lewis, and Karl Martin began at a point near Poverty Flats, surveying loops in the central part of the cave in the spring of 1973. Joined by Dave Springhetti, Bruce Zerr, and others, they mapped 6,550 feet, less than a thousand of which were on the developed tour trail. This map was presented to Father Gilbert in January 1976, as club members made plans for the major and minor areas yet unmapped. Trip reports from the time say that Bethlehem was where the "Paha Sapa Grotto lost its innocence." Referring to the complexity of accurately mapping this cave. Bethlehem is a larger and more difficult cave than Reeds. As members of the grotto graduated college and became lost to the group, those who knew the cave well became harder to come by and interest waned. Discoveries and further mapping came in fits and spurts, with Matt Wallace discovering the Duck's Nest in 1977 and grotto historian Gary Schilberg re-discovering the Further Klondike which had been lost for decades.
In mid-1984, Walt Kaminski took an interest in the mapping project, tracing and color-coding the 4-layer map (compiled as a "working copy" a few years earlier by Gary Schilberg, who included all the Grotto's Surveys). With Barket and Larry Pulaski, he renewed the survey project on July 29, 1984, near Gargoyle Hall; joined by Jim Wilson, Marvin Zaske, and others, Walt mapped numerous branches and connections of considerable interest through the remainder of 1984. Unanticipated connections between known areas were found and some new areas – such as the Yukon and NIM. This work, and some after, culminated in a map that showed 3.7 miles of passage in four levels, and as Mike Hanson said, contained the "essence of the cave.
The Mid-1980s to 2003 period of the cave would best be referred to as a time of decline. The church increased the amount of infrastructure at the location having different usages for the surface above the cave. Operations of the cave were eventually turned over to a number of contractors who ran the tours in the location. The business and Bethlehem Road both declined over this time period, with other show caves developing closer to Rapid City. Bethlehem became less convenient, and the church eventually decided it was time to sell the property. Craig Bower, who had been contract painting in the buildings, thought this was a great opportunity and purchased the cave and land from the church. Through this period, the grotto continued to have a presence at the cave in fits and spurts, but much effort was devoted to Jewel and Wind Caves which doubled in size during this period and, although there was always a friendly relationship with the church, little more than recreational trips were accomplished.
In 2003, Bower decided to sell the property at auction and Kurt Fjelland and his family purchased it. Kurt and his family purchased the cave largely for the beauty of the land, and the amazing views of the canyon, and ceased the operation of the show cave. This caused concern to many in the grotto that we would lose access to the cave forever. Kurt and his family were, however, friendly to the caving community. In this transition period, a handful of local cavers became the face of the grotto with Kurt. These folks were largely satellite members of the grotto, and because they weren't part of the large mapping efforts in other caves, they did not regularly map new discoveries, and the interactions with the new owners were sometimes odd. When this group's visits to Bethlehem ended, it also ended the presence of the grotto at the cave for a while. After some time had passed, Marc and Rene Ohms approached Kurt and were able to restart this relationship. Marc, Rene, Larry Shaffer, and a few others made some trips and found a small amount of cave, mapping it and re-surveying the Diamond Fields to find the continuation of the large passages there. However, this data was never incorporated into the cave map, and by the end of 2015, all grotto operations again ceased at Bethlehem. Eventually, through leadership changes, the grotto lost the contact information for Kurt.
In the spring of 2020, NSS member Adam Weaver tracked down Kurt's cell phone number through a little bit of determination and a lot of luck. Adam had the idea of restarting the cave mapping project from the entrance, not as a continuation. Bethlehem has had 5-7 distinct mapping projects over the years, and none have mapped the whole cave. The map that was previously created by the grotto was well done but was incomplete and did not incorporate the survey data, so it was marginal for navigation and difficult to update with new data. Kurt was willing to let the grotto take a second effort at the mapping, and Adam Weaver, Rene Ohms, Chris Pelczarski, and Nick Anderson started the first survey in May 2020. In the year and a half since beginning the project, the grotto has been able to map more than 5 miles of the cave culminating in the map by Dan Austin in this guidebook. The cave is once again the 4th longest in the Black Hills. Although this is the most complete map of the cave made to date, there is still a tremendous amount to survey and new discoveries to be made.
The future of Bethlehem Cave looks hopeful. For the first time since 1890, the cave has owners who largely allow it just to be a cave again. The Fjelland family has shown themselves to be great stewards of the cave and great friends to the caving community. Many in the grotto have even talked that it might be possible to start doing restoration in the cave now that it's largely protected from additional careless damage. From initial exploration, to tour cave, to crystal mining, to tour cave, to today's continuing exploration… after more than 130 years, it feels like things have come full circle. Explorers take most trips to the cave, systematically looking for the "way on," following the same distinctive breezes that led the McBrides deeper and deeper into this magnificent cave.
A waiver must be completed and submitted to the Preserve Management Team to obtain a permit to visit this preserve. Access to the Preserve will be administered by the Preserve Management Team, and any questions about the preserve can be directed to them.
Requests for access can be made by contacting the Preserve Management Team via email at: MammothCrystalPreserve@caves.org with any questions.
