A field trip beats the classroom any day, according to students that attended the recent 8th annual Lovelock Cave Days. Humboldt and Pershing County youngsters viewed mysterious items like dial telephones, ice boxes and typewriters before exploring the famous cave.
Bureau of Land Management volunteers guided students through the Marzen House Museum where antiques and artifacts revealed the challenging days of local pioneers and Native Americans. Other volunteers guided students along a nature trail to the cave itself. The event is sponsored by the BLM Winnemucca District in partnership with Nevada Outdoor School, Great Basin Institute, Coeur Rochester and Women in Mining.
The event is intended to promote youth awareness of natural and cultural resources on public land, said BLM archaeologist Peggy McGuckian. An educational mural used for target practice at Lovelock Cave is disrespectful and a waste of taxes, she told students.
"BLM administers it but this land belongs to all of you and we want you to respect and take care of it," she said. "The Indians believed in treating everything with respect - the plants, the animals and each other."
The understandable ignorance among young visitors of museum pieces - until recently, considered commonplace - was entertaining for museum staff member Devoy Munk.
"The kids came through and had no idea what a film canister was," she chuckled. "Some of the younger volunteers didn't known what a shaving brush or an ice box was."
Students toured medical, cowboy, pioneer, farm and mining displays plus a room dedicated to Northern Paiute culture. Retired BLM real estate specialist Lewis Trout explained the tribe's use of plants and animals to survive the harsh Great Basin living conditions. Hand-crafted fishing gear, sage bark shoes, rabbit skin blankets, finely-woven baskets and tule duck decoys attest to local Native American ingenuity.
Native American Dennis Smart of the Fort McDermitt Reservation reminded students of his people's long cultural tradition of keeping respect for all things including each other.
"Don't say anything bad about anyone - treat everyone with respect," he advised the youngsters. "I was told to always keep your word and avoid alcohol and drugs."
Volunteers later conducted a plant tour with stops along a nature trail leading up to the Lovelock Cave. Students viewed miniature sagebrush, greasewood, lichens, Mormon tea, rabbit brush and delicate Indian rice grass that helped former inhabitants survive.
NOS volunteers explained the enormous effort required for Native Americans to collect and process enough rice grass seeds and other plants for food, clothing and medicine.
"It would take a long time to collect enough seeds and, not only that, they had to grind them up," said a volunteer. "Did you see those big stones they used for grinding seeds at the museum? It took hours to make enough flour for just one loaf of flat bread."
BLM archeologist Calvin Jennings wowed students with his stories of Lovelock Cave where centuries of artifacts were discovered making it a site of world-wide significance.
"This place is really special and had a lot of great information," he said. "We believe the first occupants of the cave lived here somewhere around 3,000 years before Christ. For the Paiutes, this was a cemetery, a church for ceremonial activities and occasionally they might have lived here. More than anything else, they used it as a storage unit."
Cave dwellers left behind human remains, fishing nets, basket fragments, stone tools and a collection of 2,000 year-old duck decoys made of painted tule stems and feathers.
According to Jennings, unscientific stories persist of cannibalistic cave dwellers known as the "red-headed giants" allegedly killed in the cave and elsewhere by the Paiute tribe.
"There are some strange people in the world who wanted these red-headed giants to be extraterrestrials- to come from outer space and that's just not the case," he said. "When we look at the skeletons of the people from the graves, they're just like you and me."
A wooden deck installed inside Lovelock Cave may detract from the visitor's experience but it protects the cave and people from potentially harmful dust, Jennings said.
"Some people were unhappy with it but the deposits are so friable, it just whips up right away with the result you can't see or breathe," he said. "A lot of the western caves have fungi spores that are not particularly good for us and it's better for the cave deposits."
Jennings said there could be more artifacts below areas already excavated but no future digs are planned for the cave. However, modern, non-intrusive archaeological techniques like ground-penetrating radar could reveal unseen artifacts without needless disturbance of the site, he said.
"Our methods and approaches have changed a lot since 1968 - we can see a lot more than we used to," Jennings said. "There could be earlier deposits still in there but we sure don't want people disturbing them. We try to encourage the interest but not the action."
Rigid laws and higher penalties now protect cultural resources on public land from amateur archaeologists Jennings called "Sunday diggers."
"Private land of course is wide open - anybody can do what they want."
Lovelock Cave Days is a "great" experience not only for students but also for BLM employees said Jennings. During last year's event, he volunteered to staff the museum.
"Marzen House is a well organized, well presented museum," he said. "For their limited resources, they've done a marvelous job. It's too bad they can't afford to put more resources into an educational program."
The BLM needs volunteers for an archaeological guardianship program that watches over the Lovelock Cave and other cultural sites on public land, Jennings said.
"We'd love to see more people involved in the site stewardship program," he said. "These are volunteers that check conditions on the sites and let us know if there's a problem. They go through a training program run in collaboration with the state historic preservation office. There's a lot of monitoring that needs to be done."
As he waited for the next group of students to arrive, Jennings noticed fresh initials scrawled on a limestone rock just inside the Lovelock Cave entrance.
"Now I see what the kids were talking about - somebody has messed around in there with their chalk," he said. "That's vandalism. I don't remember seeing it here yesterday."
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