“I wasn't afraid of the cave, but I was afraid of people.”

Our host, Marci Mowery, sits down with David Cale, former owner of Laurel Caverns in the Laurel Highlands of southwestern Pennsylvania, for a conversation about one of the state's most singular natural wonders.

It’s a cave system that became Pennsylvania's 125th state park, and the first underground state park in the commonwealth.

David's relationship with Laurel Caverns began before he was born. His grandfather purchased the surrounding land in the 1920s, when the cave, then known as Delaney's Cave, was already a beloved destination for amateur explorers and weekend campers. David's earliest memories are of scrambling through its passages as a boy, naming chambers after Grieg compositions, and dreaming of what lay deeper in the mountain.

That dream never let him go. Starting at age 15, David began digging through sand-clogged passages to find a new cave no one had ever seen, eventually opening what his staff named Cale's Canyon. Today, the system spans four known miles, with perhaps four times more still buried in sand.

A philosopher by training, holding a doctorate in philosophy from Duquesne University, David ran the cavern for decades alongside his wife Lillian, pioneering bat hibernation protections as early as the 1970s and hosting Carnegie Mellon University researchers testing echolocation-inspired drones underground.

His vision for the property was always a state park. He held off developers, resisted offers of quick profit, and ultimately donated the land outright with Lillian.

Now that vision is reality.

Key Topics:

• A Family Legacy in the Cave (01:47)
• The Hall of the Mountain King (03:21)
• Buying Back Laurel Caverns (08:58)
• Bat Conservation and Hibernation Closures (12:04)
• Cave History and Local Legend (15:35)
• Tour Levels: From Guided Walks to 45-Story Descents (22:27)
• Pennsylvania's 125th State Park (26:55)
• Laurel Caverns as a Scientific Laboratory (32:20)

Resources:

• Laurel Cavern State Park: https://www.pa.gov/agencies/dcnr/recreation/where-to-go/state-parks/find-a-park/laurel-caverns-state-park
• Laurel Caverns: https://laurelcaverns.com/
• Go Laurel Highlands: https://www.golaurelhighlands.com/
• London Symphony Orchestra performing Hall of the Mountain King: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqvHWUZZdP0

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The whole idea of having the cave as a state park is to preserve it. And my vision for the property from the very beginning was a state park vision. My father, as I said, as a minister in southern West Virginia. We lived in a little town called brown wealth, the very southern bottom of West Virginia. And outside, there was a place called Pinnacle Rock State Park. And we'd go up there to big rock. We used climate, and they had all the pygmy shelter there and the tables, it was very rustic and very nice. So we started doing the development of Laurel caverns. I was coming out of that environment there, and I just saw the property, sort of lending itself to being like a state park, not being in a state park. That was my vision for it.

Imagine a place where stress fades, fresh air fills your lungs and adventure awaits around every corner. Welcome to think outside. The podcast that inspires you to explore, connect and embrace the outdoors.

Hi. Welcome to think outside with the Pennsylvania parks and Forest Foundation, I'm your host, Marcy Mallory, and today our guest is David kale. He is the owner of Laurel caverns, and by the time this airs, Laurel caverns will be Park number 125, in the state park system, because of Mr. Kale. And we're really excited to learn about his history with Laurel caverns. And you know some of the stories that he has to share with us. So welcome David. Thank you for being here. Glad to be here so you know you've been involved with Laurel caverns for a very long time. So can you share with our listeners your earliest memory of Laurel caverns, and how did your relationship with the caverns begin?

Well, it began because my grandfather bought all the land around here in about 1926 so by the time I came along, it was called delaney's cave, and my grandfather just, we all just always came up on a Sunday afternoon, and it was already a very popular tourist destination. It was just a wild cave. It had accumulated its own following of people like the Pittsburgh Explorers Club and people like that that came up every weekend. And it was typically we would the family would drive up there on a Sunday, usually a Sunday afternoon after church, go there and that crowd in the summertime, in the wintertime, no, but the same crowd would always be there, and they would be head tents, and they would camp over the weekend, and some of them people would come exploring, and other people just came in and went exploring. And that was the way the place was in those days. So my earliest memory would have been about the time when I was maybe first grade, second grade, I decided to go down into the cave by myself, Yes, and I grabbed a flashlight, and off I went. And I've been down there with my dad a few times, but I wasn't afraid of the cave, but I was afraid of people, and I go into what we now call the Hall of the Mountain King, and that gets where it gets its name, and I got down in there, and I don't there's a spring in that cave, and water in the distance of the cave sounds like voices when, when people would get lost, and they would sit there in the darkness, they would hear the water on and they would think people were coming. They were here, we're here. But it was just the water of the spring. The water does that. So I thought people were in the cave. So I turned around, and I started working my way back up. And it wasn't an easy walk in those days, but I was scrambling out of there to get back because I thought people were down there later on, always remembering that I heard a piece of music by Greg in which Greek depicts a young boy Peer Gynt, who is inside a mountain which is inhabited by the Mountain King. And as he walks along, he keeps imagining the this giant is behind him. And so he starts walking faster and faster and faster. And of course, Grieg depicts that in that very familiar piece of music. Oh yes, yes, Pastor. And so that is why I named that passage the Hall of the Mountain King.

I love that. And for perspective, you're a child, you're going down into the caverns. What is the size of the cavern? So for people who haven't been there, like, what were you undertaking? Well, on

that expedition, we have, right now, four miles of cave. We did not have the cave that much cave in those days, because one of my projects in life was to keep opening up and finding new cave where no one's ever been. I started that when I was 15 years old. I started the dig that eventually led to what. They nicely named the kales Canyon. I didn't name it that, but the staff did. It was a breakthrough too. Into a large section of cave had quite a bit and we have found that by digging out the level passage, we can get into larger dip passages. Think about the rock bed slopes down the mountain turns deep where the stream comes out. We have several streams come together in the cave where the last stream comes out on the mountain. To give you an idea of the distance and the slope, if we were to put the Washington Monument on at the where the stream comes out, okay, and then and our visitor center, which is up at the entrance, standing on the balcony of our visitor center, we would be looking down on top of the monument. Oh, my, we're higher than Okay, get that's the idea of the elevation difference, yes. So the cave now slopes and streams tend to run downhill, and the passages would be that we have open flushes the sand out of those passages, but the cross passages tended to be not that way. So the part of the game in finding new cave where no one's ever been is to dig across a level of cross passage and break into an open or deeper passage, okay, and that, that is

what we did that makes sense. I was reading the history on your website, which I'll link to the podcast, but there was a period of time after your grandfather owned it, where it exchanged hands that it wasn't in the kale family, and then you became owner. So talk a little bit about what inspired you to take on this as a project and as a calling.

Well, first, when I left home when I was 16 years old to join my grandfather in the development of the cave. Okay, so I worked there in up until I had to go to college my freshman year and went to my father was a minister in southern West Virginia, so I wound up going down to Concord College, now called Concord University. And of course, I couldn't stay away from caving. So first thing I did as a freshman my first month there, I founded a caving club, the first caving club in West Virginia. They never had a grotto, and so I named it the Concord grotto, and it got about 30 members gathered together. That's a couple of so I said, oh, there's neat caves around. I can learn that all from the people that come up the delaney's cave. I'd learned where all these caves were. So the Concord water became official, and we went on to discover caves. And I found what a vertical cave may be, the deepest or vertical cave in West Virginia. It went about 80 feet straight down. But I had to be rescued from that, because I rappelled into it and I couldn't get back up. They had to pull me out. So even while going to my freshman year of college, I was still caving. So now, as I'm ending that we're coming back up to work with my grandfather. Now we have to open up. It's July one, and we're 1964 I took the first tour the day we opened, and and three and then, and he made me the manager, and I was and then he said, three months after we opened, he sold the cave, yeah, and all of a sudden I didn't have a job. I think he helped me out with a little bit of money to go to college. My dad couldn't really afford to send me to college too well, he was having some financial problems, so I went to work for the new owners. And being that I knew where everything was, they made me the manager that saved maybe that I was back into West Virginia University, and my doctorate is in the philosophy of science. I have a doctor from Duquesne University, so my so I have this academic life paralleling the cave life. So my life essentially is this is basically science teaching, being a professor.

What brought you back to the cavern and being the owner of the cavern? I never left it,

because the whole time I'm going that I'm still also running world cameras, because now I run it for the the people who bought it, and then they were going to do a lot development there. They they were preserving the cave. That was good, but they wanted to do a lot development all the land around it, which was natural for the huge investment there, but it would have also very much affected the hydrology of the cave, the character of the cave, and it would have put it in the middle of his little of this town, like a bare rock type of thing. So I got together with Don Shoemaker, who owned the summit inn, and Don was kind enough to see the idea of preserving that property. And so don then financed a 25% ownership now, this is 1973 now, and he financed a 25% ownership for me. So, because I had no money, I mean, I ran it for them. I wasn't making any money teaching or anything. It was like that. So, but I was running, I was the manager all those years, and I was also active at doing those same. Same years. I was president of the Laurel Highlands Visitors Bureau, now called Go Laurel Highlands. I was President of the Pennsylvania attractions Association back when I was 25 years old. All those at the same years, going to doing the university stuff, being the involved in all the state stuff, with organizations and running Laurel caverns. So all that was going on at the same time. Then in 1986 Don wanted to sell, and so I then thanked again. Don helped cosign for me make the mortgage payments. I spent my whole life making mortgage payments. So in 1986 then I was able to buy out Laurel caverns from dawn, and fortunately, by that time, I had also met a very wonderful woman named Lillian, who was a school teacher. She had brought a school field trip there in 1975 and we began dating, and I We got married in 77 and so she's been my partner in running Laurel caverns really made it possible for me to tootle off be a college professor. She carried so many so much of the weight of the operation. She still works with it today. Works especially as school field trips, but she handles so much, many other things. She helps with the finance and everything like that. So she's been a real partner in the running of Laurel caverns, and I look back on it, and I don't know that I could have possibly stayed as a been a college professor, been there, had it not been for her being right

there with me. Yeah, and we'll recognize that it's good to have have a partner both in life as well as sharing your passion. One of the things when you talk about managing the Caverns is, I know that you mentioned that it's not open year round, even though we know that within a cave, it's a pretty consistent temperature, but you're doing some things to conserve other inhabitants of the caverns. Can we? Can we talk a little bit about those other inhabitants and how you've been protecting them.

The people had been going in the cave over the years. One of the big problems the cave was first found in 1794, and we don't think the Native Americans knew about it. The own entrance had to be kind of opened up. But evidently some bats were in there, or at least they began populating the cave shortly thereafter. But by we had maybe 2500 bats, maybe by 1960 7s when we opened. The problem was that the and this, I'm sure, was going on for a long time, but I began to notice that people were harming the bats when they were in bat hibernation, they're they're not there this summer, they're actually leaving now. There's only we went in and did a count the other day. This is April 1 or second right now, but every two bats were always found left in the cave right now. But all winter they're there. So we little caverns, and I think I'm right on it, because I was, we were members of the National caves association in the 1970s early 1980s became the first cave to shut down for bad hibernation. Nobody else does it anywhere in the United States, as far as I know, Woodward cave now, and that's because the Game Commission had them do it. Basically everybody else just went right through it, but in our case, with our caving and everything, we just did that. So that's why we and we were keeping that and I'm so pleased to see, thanks to the Game Commission, thanks to the DC and our that that will still be honored, and there will be and the bats will be protected, because we lost our population due to white nose syndrome. We can get it back. It's going to take a lot of years, but if we leave them alone, protect them, we can get that bat population restored.

What I understand with bat biology is that just your presence and disturbing them, they only have a limited amount of resources,

earns up their energy. Yes, then they starve to death, literally, yes,

I saw my first bat two nights ago. I was out walking the dog, and I saw my first bat of the year. So I was

they're coming back all along Chestnut Ridge. Chestnut Ridge is the first ridge of the Appalachian Mountains, and it's the first place that air has an uplift. So the bats are coming one they and the bats and all these migrating species use Chestnut Ridge as a highway because of that uplift we have with that was that's why the windmills are a little bit of a threat to them on there, yeah. But anyway, that's what they do, back and forth. And so yeah, our best. They're not the local bats. You see, those are tree bats. Are different. Yes, our bats, arcade bats, take off down from beforehand for the Carolinas.

Yeah, I like bats. They do so much good for the Yeah, the environment, eating insects, pollinating. Also, they're fantastic. Yes, or is there any story or legend either about the K. Or that has stood out to you and your your decades of being there as a young, young man, as a child, as a young man, as a manager, that have stood out to you?

Well, the problem is that when you study the history, you you know the history. It's rather, relatively boring, nothing. It's just people going in, we have people lost in there as early as 1801 the popular legend of the cave is that it was used by this gang of robbers as a place to hide gold and all that sort of thing that became popular that was based on a book written in 1865 called white rocks, and it referred to this robber's den and people and but it has a story in there about this one person in the book Getting lost in delaney's Cave. So people conflated the two and thought the cape, it was never used like that. Even in the 1860s the cave was still a popular place for people to come. We in 1816 John Paxton recorded that the walls of the cave were covered with names and initials. Even in 1816 one of the big projects I had was trying to get a lot of that graffiti out of the cave, and also broken glass. People went in, they would smash bottles, and we got getting a broken glass out of the cave. So we really don't have anything like that. For a long time, we thought that Native Americans had used the cave. We assumed that we never found any artifacts near there, but we assumed that. But when, when Ryan was doing his research on the history of Laurel caverns, he really dug deep into some of these early newspaper articles, and we found that when the cave was discovered, the discoverer had to really dig through a huge the sinkhole, all these leaves to get to. And when he, even when he did, all he did was looking through tree roots in 1794 and when, when the there's an article in 1797 somebody went up to the Delaney farm, went to the farmhouse and wanted to go see this cave that Delaney had found. And Delaney handed him an ax because he had to use an ax to hack through the tree roots to get into the cave. Interest. But over the years, people broke all that away that those trees sort of disappeared and we preserve it.

Yeah. So lots of Legends. So for people that are listening that have not been to Laurel caverns, what would they expect to see? What would they expect on a visit to the caverns?

Well, what people expect to see is what every other cave in the United States looks like. There's this old line. Well, you've seen one cave, you've seen them all. They expect to walk in. They expect to see stalactites, stalagmites and everything like that. LAUREL Caverns is more of a sandstone cave, a calcareous sandstone. Now that's just a fancy way of saying. It's sandstone with a lot of lime built into it. It's about two thirds sand and 1/3 calcium carbonate. And what makes Laurel caverns different is kind of what you can see behind me. Here are the corrugations in the rock. In a normal cave, the walls are relatively straight, or rocky goes up, and then you have these nice formations of beautiful stalactites and stalagmites. In Laurel caverns, the beauty is in the walls. The walls are all convoluted like this. And as a result, in the convolutions, that's where the real beauty of the cave is. To understand that, think of it like this. The rock was formed about 340 million years ago. It would take a month, and we have them right around there somewhere. And in that period of time. So the the sand from the ocean floor mixed with calcium in the sea life, corals, seashells, this may have been a closer to a beach area. There's even some belief that it was Aeolian. That just means it was a wind blown sand mixing with the calcium. But in any case, instead of the rock being uniform calcium and sand, it's a combination. It's kind of mixture. It's lumpy, little more calcium here, a little less calcium over here, a little more calcium over here, and more sand over here. Now, when the rock starts it starts out as a flat bed of rock. Then with the forming the mountains, this flat bed of rock gets a tilt to it like that. That's that slope we have going up the mountain.

Okay? Like you were saying, you can see the top of the right Washington Monument, yeah? We like, yes.

So we have that big tilt up on the rock bed, and it developed these little hairline cracks in them, they call joint lines. And then when the rain falls through the air, the rain picks up carbon dioxide, carbon dioxide plus water forms carbonic acid. Very, very mild, but it gets it's able to seep into those crevices, especially when the rock was in the water table. When the mountain eroded down, got into the water table, and it began to decaying the rock in. To sand in others that leached out the calcium carbonate leaving behind the sand residue. In a normal cave, the mostly calcium carbonate, so the back the void, the opening of the cave forms immediately, and then this water drips and forms the stalactites. In Laurel caverns, the normal status is to be clogged floor to ceiling with sand, and then the decayed rock is in the middle. So it's sand in the middle. And then the outside walls reflect the lumpiness of the ratio of the calcium to the sand. So where there is, like is in the picture I have behind me, where there is I have the seagulls six in here. I know in this location right here that there was not much calcium. I mean, there was this calcium was not much here, so the rock decayed at a faster rate than here. But as I go up into here, I start to see that it's sticking out more, and that means there was more calcium in that period, more resistance to the decay process, and these convolutions very often form pockets and all kinds of odd shapes in the walls. And that's where part of rural caverns has its

beauty nice. And that then goes back to it. When we started, you indicated that when you had to excavate some sand to find these,

that's right. So that's why, that's what I mean. Mostly, can I think we have 20 miles of Cave of all the sand we're out of the cave. That's the thing. When we take out the sand, we see all those convolutions in the walls. If the cave had formed, been formed by erosion, which is everyone's expectation, that wouldn't be the case. The walls would be that you would need the erosion to get all those forms. But it's not. It's a corrosion process, the erosion simply moves the sand. However, most not very much of the sand in the cave has been really moved. We have huge areas, just mazes of passages clogged floor to ceiling with sand. So even though we have four miles of open cave, probably have another at least four times that much in passages clogged floor to ceiling with sand that are there.

So how much of the cave is open to the public? Somebody were to come visit to are they taken on a guided walk? What does the visitation process look like? What we want to talk

about are the ways in which the cave is set up for tours. It follows the slope of the mountain, and as a result, the cave passages. The further down the mountain you get, the more challenging it is. So what we have is we have the level one tours. Are the easy guided tours. You can go with a guide, no steps. We follow the traverse of the mountain, the level passages, and you can see you would walk about, actually two and a half football field lengths. It won't seem like it, but that's how far you walk, no steps, and you see all the upper maze. You see a lot of cave. Then we go to level two. Now that's if you have good knees, and you can walk 153 steps. Now that takes you down 15 stories, down over back up again, and you see a lot of big passages. That Hall of the Mountain King I talked about earlier that I found when first went into Yes, Grand Canyon passage, we have Calico falls, the 45 foot high water falls. So you see a lot more going down 15 stories. Now, let's suppose you're even more adventurous then, and you want to do some of the crawling. You want to see some of these, all these, because we only show our whole cave. You're not seeing the lighted part of the cave. It is probably only maybe a mile of cave. Mile out of four miles lit up. The rest of it, just a lot more cave. So you want to see some of those crawl passages and some of the other caving. So then we have what we call tour and crawl. That's our third level, and that takes you down into the more little further down in and just log the side passages. And then there you have to wear old clothes, and we give you a light hard hat and everything. And then we go to the fourth level, and that takes you down 25 stories down, okay? And you're down to what we call the ballroom, the bat room, some of the larger rooms further down, totally in the original state, just like they were 100 years ago. And then for the ones who really, really want to go all the way down, we take them 45 stories down to the bottom, as far as down as the stream goes to where it disappears and the stream doesn't come out, or to a location another 15 stories down, further down the mountain, that's where you get the Washington Monument is 55 stories tall. The Cave from the top to the bottom, where is over about 65 stories so in elevation difference. So you call it the Tour

de craw. So for once, you're getting to, like, levels 345, is it low passages? So you are literally crawling,

actually further down you go. The bigger it gets interesting. And the upper part you're seeing the smallest passages of the cape, the first. Further you go, the bigger and bigger, bigger, bigger. When you get the biggest rooms of the cave aren't on our in our lighted cave. That's another thing unique about Laurel caverns. On the guided tours, they show their biggest rooms at Laurel caverns, you have to wear old clothes, bring your and we've supplied the lights. You have to wear shoes, hiking boots with a quarter inch tread lace above the ankles, and to be prepared to hike down 25 stories, or down 45 stories, to really see the big stuff. And you're going to see it just the way it was 100 years ago, or, you know, 1000 years ago.

So I imagine on your website there is like, if you're planning to do the deeper caverns, these are the things you need to do, because you can't show up in the summer on your shorts and your flip flops thinking that you're gonna go down.

So we have cave for every level we can take you in a wheelchair down. We're not accessible, legally accessible, because of the absolute criteria. We can't be but we but when somebody comes in, especially children, where they're lighter, easier to work with, we can get them down in a wheelchair all through that upper easy part, we can do that the but the lower part where the steps are, no we can't do that.

And are there picnic facilities or things? We have

picnic tables outside the state probably we had a picnic shelter. They'll be replacing it someday, but right now, we do have picnic tables outside.

Well, you mentioned the state. So the cavern is going into its next phase of life, and it will be the 125th state park in Pennsylvania, and it will be the first Underground State Park. So what are your hopes for the caverns in this, this next phase of its its being? Well, the

whole idea of having the cave as a state park is to preserve it. And my vision for the property, from the very beginning was a state park vision my father, as I said, as a minister in southern West Virginia. We lived in a little town called Brown, well, the very southern bottom of West Virginia. And outside there was a place called Pinnacle Rock State Park. And we'd go up there to this big rock. We used climate, and they had all the pygmy shelter there and the tables, and it was very rustic and very nice. So when I we started doing the development of world caverns, I was coming out of that environment there, and I just saw the property, sort of the lending itself to being a kind of as, like, like a state park, not being a state park, but that was my vision for it. And I remember when my grandfather wanted a we needed a sign at the entrance, and he saw the price of getting his big painted sign, he thought was that's a lot of money. And I told him, I said, I'll make you a sign for $10 enterprise, yeah, these are professional sign makers, and you're going to tell me, you'll make me a sign. No, you can't so anyway, but fortunately, my grandfather, he was an accountant, and he was not there all the time. So I got to work. I got cut down. So I got some logs. I cut them. I notched them up. Put two vertical logs, not log across the top, little chain down. I had two by sixes. I didn't have a router, but I did have a with a screwdriver and a hammer I chiseled out using a the letters and on the thing, and I had Laurel caverns and the Water Board had an arrow, and I painted them yellow, just like the state parks. So I made a sign look just like the West Virginia State Park sign entrance.

Do you still have the sign? What's that?

No, I wish I'd saved it now, but yes, I didn't think like that. So my granddad comes up, and he looks at that, and he says, I said, there's $10 and he he said, Well, I guess it'll do for now. So Okay. Well, then he sold the property, and the new owners kept it. They let me, you know, they saw that too. And so we stayed there. And it stayed there for about four years. And then they we wanted to put up a larger, newer sign, and which became a big concrete sign. And actually that I also designed for that. So, yeah, that was there, yeah. So I see I had this vision all along well. So as each owner came along, we and that was where the where the people, my grandfather that sold it to, they had a different vision for the property. They didn't see a state park. They saw a ski resort with combination, where the cave was more of its summer activity, and they with all with lot sales all around it. But don Shoemaker allowed he was into the idea of preserving it. We didn't really use the word State Park, but preserving it in accord with its own history. And that meant preserving all the land in accord with its own history, yeah, and that was very important to me. And a lot of people said, Dave, I could put a million dollars in your pocket. Or, you know, people can come up and do lot developer. People want to buy lots. Or, you. And I wouldn't sell it. I kept it everything, just like it was. I never really but I began. I was chairman of the Pennsylvania travel Council in the 1990s when Tom reach was governor, and so I interacted a lot with the state government, and that's when I began working with members of the DCNR to talk got the discussion going. But it wasn't until, and really, we were still in discussions, when John Ellis calls me up and said, Hey, David the coder, put it into the into his budget. Now we're donating the land. So he didn't, he didn't need the money to give me any money, happy to donate it. And I said, Well, with that, then we just have to make it happen. And that's where it went. So that's what it is. So I'm happy to Fortunately, with after the world's been good to me and my I'm financially in a situation where I can say, just, I can just, don't we, you know, Lily, and I can just donate it because, you know, in a way, that this is part of her heritage too, you know? So, right? She's part of that donation too. I wouldn't be able to do it without her permission. She's been supportive of that, and that's wonderful,

and that's that's very generous of both of you, and you've spent so many years being a caretaker of this special place, and not just of the caverns, but of its its denizens, of the visitors, of exciting people about geology and place, and then to to be able to continue that as a state park. That's That's very generous. And I, I want to thank you personally. I also want to thank you on behalf of of the residents of the Commonwealth, both today and in future generations. Thank you for that. Well, thank you, Marcy. So we're getting ready to wrap up. If there's one thing you'd like to leave with the listeners, either about the caverns or your connection to the outdoors or a message for the future, what would that be?

My message would be this. Now, remember, you're coming from the point of view of someone in science, right? Use it for recreation. Use it for learning of the geology, but also use it for a lab. Universities can use it. There's all kinds of experiment. We can experiment with how best to preserve bats. We can preserve it and use it to study how best to restore bat populations. So there's a lot of science there.

I think about Velcro. I mean, that was somebody observing how, like the triggers grab onto your clothes so that right out of nature, yes, yes, yeah. So there is, you're right. I mean, there's a lot of ways that, if we study natural systems, study other beings, you know, we can see, we can learn.

I'll tell you, just to add, if you don't mind, what Cargill melon was doing there. They one of their things. They also experimented with drones. And they came in, into the cave, and they had these little drones, which were worked like little bats. And the drones could would see the cave just like bats could see the cave. And they would go and they'd put these little plastic little statues, little plastic items, different things, on little ledges in the cave. And then the drones were programmed, and those little drones went out from their control center, which we have in the cave, and they would go out, find those little items, look for them, find them, pick them up off the ledges, and bring them back to the people. Work. Isn't that amazing? It is amazing that was done at that work was research, was done at Laurel caverns, working with Carnegie Mellon University. That is what I would like to see us going forward with in the future. Thanks, like that,

yeah, well, David, it's been wonderful to have this conversation with you, and I with you. Yeah, and again, thank you and Lillian for your generosity and for your being a caretaker of this special place. And we're going to meet in person in a couple of days, and I'm very excited to meet you in person and and to be a part of the celebration so

and thank you for honoring us for being a part of your podcast that we appreciate, that

you're quite welcome.

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