The Wasden Caves
Eighty Thousand Pieces of the Past By Jeff Carr
The Wasden Caves
Eighty Thousand Pieces of the Past
By Jeff Carr
In the middle of the Arco Desert west of Idaho Falls, a long way down a purposely unmarked path, there is a hole in the ground that puts things into perspective.
Not many people know about this hole, which is both good and bad. It’s better preserved that way. I found out just a few years ago, in my cramped office at the Museum of Idaho. A colleague sat down, leaned in, and told me we might be getting a new collection of artifacts from a cave in the Arco Desert. She said it was a pretty big deal. As I listened, and later searched online, I wondered how it was possible that I hadn’t heard of this cave or its treasures before. It was a big deal. But I didn’t know the half of it until I met Randy.
In the early 1960s, when Randy Harris was about nine years old, he first saw this hole and two others near it. On long Saturdays, he and his two brothers kicked rusty cans over the cracked earth, which clanged off rocks and nested in sagebrush. To a boy playing pretend, the landscape didn’t offer much to work with. Maybe some fantasy about a cowboy left for dead, who had to avoid rattlesnakes and make his way back to town. That story wouldn’t require much of an imagination. The land eased upward just enough to obscure Idaho’s mountains from view, which made the spot seem even more lifeless and barren. It might as well have been the 1860s, because in a hundred years, nothing had changed.
These Saturday trips to the desert, a hot hour’s ride from home, accomplished at least three purposes. First, it brought the boys together. Twelve-year-old Steve, gruff and curious, with a blond pompadour and thick-framed glasses, barely tolerated his younger brothers, and treated them civilly only when watched. For introverted Randy and Rick, squirming in his shadow, the dislike was mutual. Surely the desert, devoid of distractions, might force a temporary alliance. Second, the boys got time with their grandfather, a local radio station manager named Leonard Wasden. And third, Leonard got to check on his land, an investment property that the government paid him not to farm.
For the Harris boys, these excursions were made a little more worthwhile because they included a visit to the caves, a cluster of three sudden openings in the earth, mostly filled with dirt, but caves nonetheless. These offered different kinds of adventure, plus the only cool shelter and shade for miles—qualities that had been attracting boys and girls and their parents to this very spot for thirteen thousand years.
* * * * *
On a fall day in 1965, Leonard received a phone call from a representative of the Upper Snake River Prehistoric Society. This was a group of locals who mostly worked at the nearby National Reactor Testing Station and practiced amateur archaeology on the weekends. The man explained that a spot on Leonard’s land had been the subject of repeated rumors of a “pot hunter’s find.” On October 23, society members investigated, found the caves, and observed evidence of what they called “heavy Indian inhabitation.” They also saw evidence of recent digging by relic hunters. Grasping the potential importance of the site, as well as the urgency in preserving it, they alerted the full society, including an Idaho State University (ISU) archaeologist. The society then tracked down the landowner, Leonard, because nothing could happen without his permission. He agreed to let the society excavate under the direction of ISU, so long as he retained ownership of the findings, a fairly standard arrangement for this sort of thing. Millennia after southerly winds had begun filling up the caves with one wispy layer of sand after another, the decision to remove it took only eight days. The work began on Halloween.
“I was there when they turned the first scoop of dirt,” remembered Lois Bleak, now in her eighties. She also helped name the caves: Owl Cave after finding one roosting there, Dry Cat after encountering a bobcat there. “I wasn’t there when they named Coyote Cave,” Lois told me, “so I don’t know about that one.”
The digging began in Owl Cave, which the society judged to be most inhabitable, because of its sandy base and favorable angle to the sun. A graduate of a night-school course in archaeology, Lois was the society’s most highly trained member. “Every weekend, whoever of us was available came out here and removed dirt very meticulously, not just digging down, but taking it off in circles and squares,” she said. Despite only working weekends, findings came quickly—mostly small mammal bones, at first. Society members carefully plotted the position and location of each one, and then brought them home for cleaning and preservation.
Society members kept coming, bringing spouses and even children. Lois’s son Bruce recalled how the adults let the kids “do their own dig” near the mouth of the cave, and then quickly took over if the kids actually found anything. He remembered this vividly, despite being only four or five at the time. He later spent twenty-five years in the mining industry, a fact he revealed with a smile. “Yeah, recovering metal out of the ground.”
The original Wasden site kids, the Harris brothers, were not so inclined. Their father and other family members started successful card and gift franchises in southern California. After graduation from Shelley High School, Randy got a commercial art degree from college, Steve got a degree in biology, and they both joined the family business on the coast.
Back at the site, at a depth of about six feet, the society uncovered a bison bone bed from more than sixty different bison, dating back eight thousand years. Evidence suggested that early inhabitants had driven these beasts into the cave, trapped them, and speared them, even meticulously breaking their bones to extract marrow. Humans probably didn’t live in the cave full-time, but returned to it each year as part of their seasonal rounds: bison here, camas bulbs farther west, obsidian farther north. At a stable 42 to 44 degrees Fahrenheit all year around, according to Lois Bleak’s thermometer, the cave may have been a relatively pleasant place to ride out the winter, store meat, and extract water from the snow above.
Sue Miller was a biology and chemistry student when she first moved to Idaho Falls and got in with the society. “I was attracted to the energy and enthusiasm and skill of the society members,” she said. The experience caused her to switch her focus to archaeology. Now the self-proclaimed Bone Lady of Idaho Falls, she was an ISU doctoral student in 1975 when she became field director of the Wasden site. Excavations had stalled four years before, when the society had run into a “roof fall,” or heavy rock that fell from the top of Owl Cave and buried parts below. Sue’s faculty supervisor at ISU, archaeologist Earl Swanson, had just been awarded a sixty-nine-thousand-dollar grant from the National Science Foundation to remove the roof fall and resume digging for three more years. However, by the time the digging began, Earl, who suffered from Type I diabetes, was nearly blind. “He would take a little bit of the sediment and chew on it and he could tell you how much sand or silt was in it,” Sue told me. A month into the project, Earl entered the earth permanently, aged forty-seven. His grad student pressed on.
With the roof fall out of the way, excavators uncovered stone and bone tools, along with more bison, camel, and Columbian mammoth, the largest member of the elephant family, which had an average radiocarbon date of 12,500 years old. Camels and horses evolved in the Americas and bison and mammoths evolved in Siberia, Sue explained. During the Ice Age, each of these species passed back and forth. After the Bering Sea thawed out and the continents separated, the American camels that survived eventually became llamas, vicunas, and alpacas. Bison also evolved into new species. With a warming climate and hunting by humans, mammoths didn’t make it at all.
The findings from beyond the roof fall added a new level of interest in Owl Cave, now a well-preserved vertical time capsule with distinct layers of objects representing distinct eras of life—a bison with a shell here, a camel with some textile there. The site became home to significant firsts, such as the first instance of mammoth with artifacts in a rock shelter in the Northwest. That may not sound like much, but in archaeology, a field that relies on elusive, minuscule clues to fill massive gaps in knowledge, true firsts are rare. “The site… set a chronology for the culture in this area, not just for the people, but for the animals and the environment,” Sue told me.
And then the funding ran out. “Burnout is probably a trite word,” Sue said, “but we had some of our stalwarts in the society move away or pass away, and for whatever reason, the core group of us at Team Wasden didn’t spend as much time as we could looking at the site…I think it was just kind of a normal human thing where people drifted off to other things.”
Twenty miles away, Leonard Wasden died from a heart attack while shoveling snow. Farther away, Randy and Steve Harris, partners in the family business, had a falling out. Steve went to law school, parted ways with the company, and moved away. The brothers rarely spoke for more than twenty years. Randy shrugged. “Life happened.”
* * * * *
Suzann Henrikson was also nine years old when she first saw the caves a few years after the Harris boys. She visited on a Saturday with her father, an engineer with an interest in archaeology. By the late-1960s, during the society’s excavations, the caves had already become part of local lore, and Suzann’s father wanted to see it for himself. She remembers her dad pointing at the gaping hole buffeted by excavation equipment, scaffolding, and screens. “That was the turning point for me,” she said. “I decided that I wanted to be an archaeologist.” [See Suzann’s archeology stories in IDAHO magazine, June 2018 and August 2019.]
But by the time Suzann enrolled at ISU as an archaeology student, the work had stopped. “The collections were shoved into boxes in corners and along walls,” she told me. “It was just so incredibly tantalizing, and as my career at ISU progressed, it was also really frustrating because no one was opening those boxes.” She figured the massive collection was just plain overwhelming to researchers. Several years later, as Suzann embarked on a PhD program, she observed references to the Wasden site slowly fading from the academic literature. “It was heartbreaking to see publications where they would make a nod, going, ‘Well, you know, the Wasden Site could’ve been really interesting.’”
Suzann made it her mission to revive serious interest in the site as vital to learning more about the earliest Americans. “It is that important,” she said. But turning the academic tide is a bit like steering a fourteen-foot Columbian mammoth. There’s momentum involved. She began publishing academic papers and encouraging colleagues to do the same. Then at the 2008 annual meeting of the Society of American Archaeology in Vancouver, she hosted a symposium and invited several of Wasden’s biggest naysayers—those who thought the site had nothing more to give. There, the researchers had to read eight to ten of these new papers in preparation for a discussion, and Suzann essentially dared them to stand up and naysay again. Her strategy worked. The researchers conceded that Wasden deserved another chance.
Her advocacy also resonated with The Archaeological Conservancy, a small nonprofit that acquires sites of interest nationwide and works with local stewards to protect them. The outfit approached Steve Croft, the newest in a long string of landowners after Leonard Wasden, and purchased the ten acres surrounding the caves, with Suzann charged to protect them from erosion and human incursion. It was the conservancy’s first land purchase in Idaho.
There’s a lot that makes the Wasden site important, Suzann told me, but one feature stands out: the presence of mammoth remains and Folsom points together. Folsom points are a distinct type of leaf-shaped projectile point used in North America, dating from 9500 to 8000 BC—at least two thousand years after Columbian mammoths are thought to have gone extinct. The natural conclusion, upon finding these things together, is that the dates used by archaeologists throughout the world are wrong. Either Folsom culture sprang up a lot earlier than we thought or Columbian mammoths survived a lot longer than we thought. Either way, that’s an enormous discovery. Of course, that’s also what makes academics skeptical. Mammoth and Folsom points have never been found together anywhere else, so it can’t be true. “Everybody gets in their rut,” Suzann observed. Part of her argument is that most Folsom point research comes from the Great Plains, while mountainous Idaho is a different animal.
She’s published a great deal on the Wasden site in academic journals. She also appeared in the local newspaper, the Post Register, in 2012. “A few miles west of Idaho Falls lie three caves and an archaeological legacy that Suzann Henrikson can’t let go,” that report begins. She discusses how much it would cost to resume digging (ten thousand dollars per cubic yard) and makes a grand statement about uncovering the past to save humanity from repeating its mistakes. What Henrikson doesn’t say in the article is that she was near the point of giving up her quest to revive Wasden, tired of trying to steer the mammoth. This newspaper “fluff piece,” as she called it, wouldn’t matter to anyone in her field, wouldn’t even register. But it did come up on an online search four years later by a retired designer named Randy Harris.
Harris looked up Suzann’s number and called her, introducing himself as the grandson of Leonard Wasden. He had had a vague idea that excavations had occurred on his grandfather’s land, but didn’t know anything more. Suzann relayed the history, explained how important the site was, and that there was much yet to research. She said he could help if he wanted. New advances in archaeological techniques would likely bolster her theories and the site’s importance if only they could keep digging, she told him. What’s more, the Wasden family probably still had ownership rights over the eighty thousand artifacts that had been extracted from Owl Cave in the 1960s and ‘70s, and so could be influential in encouraging movement. Suzann and Randy also later learned that they had each visited the caves at nine years old, and that they were both Shelley High School Russets. Suzann told me that first call was “a godsend, like something was working in my favor.”
* * * * *
In geology, time is measured in epochs, not lives. Lava flows, plates move and collide, and glacial processes shape what the earth looks like to us, how it feels under our feet. Geologically, the current face of Idaho is young. The lava pushed up by a hotspot in the earth’s mantle, flowing out of a volcanic vent and hollowing out the rock to create Wasden Caves, was only eight million years ago—a point on the timeline so recent that the very same hotspot is still churning out lava to this day, about seventy-five miles from Yellowstone.
On that scale, the thirteen thousand years separating us from Owl Cave’s earliest residents is a speck. A few of us might climb gingerly down into a cave, touch the cold rock and marvel, however briefly, about the wind and the water that shaped it. But humans aren’t built to regard things in geological time. Our lives are shaped by layers of fleeting words spoken in passing, lingering hugs, childhood wonder. And eroded by death.
When Randy Harris called Suzann Henrikson, it was in the wake of tragedy. Sometime before, his eldest grandson, a bright ten-year-old, had his life cut short. Randy didn’t go into detail, but as he talked to me on the phone from California, he required long pauses to steady himself. “It kind of humbled us,” he said. By “us,” he meant his big brother Steve and him, both of them now battered by the pressures of life. The brothers talked at the funeral, the first in a series of long conversations during which they settled their differences.
Randy wanted to help Suzann with the caves but didn’t know where to start. He reached out to Steve with trepidation, hoping his big brother would grab on. He did. “This was our grandfather’s legacy and we felt a sense of stewardship,” Randy explained. The two traveled to Idaho Falls to meet with Suzann and with Sue Miller. The group shared a vision of advocating for the site and its artifacts, which first meant determining who actually owned them. Steve’s law background came in handy. After poring through hundreds of documents, he learned that Leonard Wasden had, with incredible foresight, ensured in the contract with the Upper Snake River Prehistoric Society that the landowners would retain ownership of all artifacts, with only custodianship granted to ISU. The contract also specified that artifacts and findings should be made available to scientists and the public to derive “all possible information of historic interest.” The Harrises had reason to believe that this point, along with the entire collection, had been neglected. Life happens.
Separately, Leonard’s will transmitted all assets, “whether now known or hereafter discovered,” to his children, who were now dead. The eighty thousand artifacts legally belonged to all of the living descendants of Leonard and his brother-in-law, who co-owned the land. Steve suggested forming a nonprofit, the Wasden Archaeological Association, to act on behalf of the now-large family, and he suggested that Randy be president. The younger brother was touched.
“I specifically remember thinking. ‘Wow.’” He paused. “What more could I ask than to be recognized as an equal?”
The brothers set to work. “It was the first time that we were actually communicating and working and dividing tasks with ease,” Randy said. “It was a whole new chapter.” Steve drew up documents to assert ownership of the collection. Randy set about contacting all the living heirs: siblings, cousins, and more distant relatives. Few of them lived in Idaho or knew much about the caves. Randy explained the situation and asked each heir to sign ownership rights over to the Wasden Archaeological Association, which would speak with one voice for them.
“We had fun, we had success,” Randy said.
The year 2017 was particularly fruitful. Suzann had blood that was drawn from Shanzi, an elephant at the Fresno Zoo, which she compared with protein residue found on one of the Folsom points from Wasden. She confirmed that the residue came from elephant (mammoth) blood. In 2017, her paper detailing this was accepted and published in American Antiquity, considered the premier archaeology journal on the continent, and received positive feedback from throughout the field. Suzann conceded it was possible the Folsom point was used to process meat from a mammoth that had been killed centuries before, but not likely. This, then, was strong evidence in favor of an enormous find.
On a cloudy day in September, Randy, Steve, younger brother Rick, Suzann, and her husband installed three hundred feet of snow fencing to stabilize the site against further erosion. The Harrises also sat down with one of Suzann’s contacts, Carrie Anderson Athay, curator of the Museum of Idaho. The brothers were interested in seeking a permanent home for the Wasden artifacts. The independent nonprofit museum in Idaho Falls, the nearest city to the Wasden site, didn’t exist in the 1960s and ‘70s. Now the learning center was planning a major expansion. It hoped to grow its research capabilities and triple its Idaho exhibit space, including offering more on the area’s first residents.
In 2018, just a year after learning that they owned eighty thousand pieces of the past, the Harris brothers and their new organization donated them all to the Museum of Idaho. The agreement stipulated that the museum would honor Leonard Wasden’s wishes to keep the findings available to the public and to researchers for the purpose of advancing human knowledge.
Randy and Steve were speaking to each other more than they had in their entire lives, enjoying working together. One day, when Steve was renovating his deck, he reached too far off a ladder and fell. The accident was fatal.
Randy saved a recording on his phone from that first meeting at the museum. In it, he can still hear the excitement in his brother’s voice. Steve got to see the museum purchase a building to house the cave’s treasures, but not the award of a national grant, which the museum has used to renovate the building, install state-of-the-art compact shelving, and hire a collections manager specifically to catalogue the Wasden artifacts—a big job. He didn’t get to see Suzann’s and the museum’s first public tours of the caves, which sold out quickly at eighty dollars per ticket. And he didn’t get to see ulnas, scapulas, and teeth on display in a two-story glass atrium, surrounding a life-size mammoth replica, or the children and honest-to-goodness grown adults who gasped as they rounded the corner. One hundred thousand Idahoans and national park tourists from around the world will now view the collection annually. Steve also didn’t get to see the proposals that streamed in from archaeologists, who asked to study the stuff that came out of Granddad’s cave. But all that is happening.
“We’ve been getting out a lot of the information that was never published originally,” Suzann said. “We’re just helping people connect the dots.” Next, she’d like to see an endowment established, so the museum can stabilize and secure the site fully, and prepare the way for further excavation. After all, the findings that will change archaeology—if she has her way—came from just one of the holes named for Leonard Wasden, one landowner in a 130-century history. And even that one, Owl Cave, was only partially excavated, thanks to a selfless and optimistic tradition of saving some discoveries for the future, when techniques for extraction and study will have improved. The other two caves on what is now called the Wasden-Croft Archeological Preserve are still completely full of dirt, waiting.
If Suzann’s aspirations for the caves remain rooted within the hope and wonder of science, Randy’s sentiments are a bit more personal. He convened a family reunion in the summer of 2021 to share his grandfather’s caves with his own family, including his and Steve’s kids and grandkids. Knowing about the people who once walked where he walked, he said, is “meaningful in understanding our own lives and our small part in the infinite scheme of things.”
Randy and Steve weren’t the first brothers to rebuild a lasting, life-altering bond. They probably weren’t even the first brothers to fight at the caves. True firsts are rare.
Public access to the Wasden-Croft Archaeological Preserve is currently available only through tours organized by the Museum of Idaho. Learn more: museumofidaho.org/archtour.
This article was published in the Idaho Magazine November 1, 2021
