A Virtual Tour of Lehman Caves

First published in The Midden*, Great Basin National Park's newsletter, Vol. 20, No. 2, Winter 2020. By Gretchen Baker, ecologist.*

In February 2020, over two weeks, a team scanned Lehman Caves with LiDAR and photogrammetry. It was led by Blase Lasala, with help from Great Basin National Park, Zion National Park, El Malpais National Monument and the NPS Geologic Resources Division.

• A high-resolution LiDAR scanner on a tripod made 360-degree scans all along the tour route, roughly a body length apart.
• A camera took colour images from the same spots, which were combined with the LiDAR data.

LiDAR and colour scanning of part of the Lehman Caves tour route; the 3D scans became a virtual tour of the cave. NPS photo by Gretchen Baker.

Building the tour

Turning the scans into a point cloud and cleaning up the data took a great deal of time. Meanwhile a park team wrote the script and planned how the tour would flow, and consulted descendants of Takeshi Ban and the local Shoshone and Goshute tribes about the parts of the tour on the cave's inscriptions and entrance.

Then COVID arrived, and Lehman Caves closed — it has been closed ever since. Thanks to the virtual tour, more people than ever can experience the tour route.

The tour

• Three main videos, each covering a different part of the cave.
• Call-out videos with more on topics such as cave inscriptions, cave life and how the cave formed.
• Subtitles in English and Spanish and audio description, making the cave accessible in new ways.

It is on the park's website, on the Lehman Caves Virtual Tour page.

Sources

• National Park Service, Great Basin National Park, "New Virtual Tour of Lehman Caves," The Midden, Vol. 20, No. 2, Winter 2020. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/new-virtual-tour-of-lehman-caves.htm
• Rewritten in hubnx's own words.