Underground Rivers and Albino Squirrels

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Next stop: Bedford, Indiana. Yep, the home of Indiana Limestone. It also was the home of more caverns! yay!

This time, our cavern tour was entirely by boat. Yep, we went down into the US's longest underground river. We bumped along in a big metal tub with our guide, a boat light and a flashlight. It was a little funny, but very cool. We learned a lot about the ecosystem that can exist in complete darkness, and the oddities that have adapted to teh lack of light.

There were little transparent fishies that are blind, crayfish that can live for three year without food by eating thier own claws (they wait for food to come in with flooding), and bats and frogs that come in in the winter to escape the freeze. It stays a chilly 52 degrees in the cavrns at all times.

Some of the odd things that live in the cavern include a catfish that is not blind, but is apparently huge. He's adapted to the darkness and lives right beside a sinkhole that pulls in all kinds of snakes, animals and fish during big floods and rainstorms that he feasts on.

Our guide was awesome, and he scared the crap out of us by pitching us into darkness and then screaming to make us jump. Then he also showed us that the echo in the cavern lasted about 26 seconds (whoah!) and other cool stuff while he navigated around. The most interesting and different thing about these caverns was their general lack of stalagmites. There were a couple of stalagtites, but only a couple. Mostly, everything was covered in the sticky sludge-like mud that went several feet deep in places. Good thing we weren't allowed to touch it anyway...looks like it might take millions of years to wash off!

Our other stop, after driving through Kentucky for a few minutes, was Olney, Illinois. Olney has one claim to fame: albino squirrels. The city brought them in almost a century ago, turned them loose, and let them hang out with the other squirrels that populated the town. They used to be all over the place, even as little as 30 years ago, but now they're prety hard to find. We headed to the city park, where several people told us that most of them live in trees at peoples' houses in town, where the people feed them. But, you can still find a few in the park. It's apaprently the second-best place to find them. So we waited for a while, till someone else (who feeds them peanuts on his lunch break) pointed one out to us. And we had thought there were only brown, grey and black squirrels! Super cute!

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