Flying Ants

Jon and I have been looking on topographic maps and found some caves labeled not far from where we'd already been. Yesterday we drove out to locate and photograph them. Most of the caves were fairly small and uninteresting. We did find one cool cave. It was fairly big and still held ice. The entrance was lined with ferns and moss. We photographed there for a while and it was great.

However, the entire time we were out we were contending with a plague of flying ants of biblical proportions. Our first stop was a small depression near the main road that looked like it might be a cave. It wasn't and on the way back to the car we were getting swarmed by flying ants. I assumed we had just disturbed a nest or something. Our next stop was a big volcanic crater on the top of a rise, it too held ants. We made several more stops and the ants were worse at every stop. There must have been over 10,000 swarming Jon's truck after a prolonged stop at one cave. After finding all of the caves on the map we took what we thought was a dirt road that connected with the main road, after a while it petered out into a cow trail through the sage and rocks and ended at an impassable fence a few hundred yards from the main road. So, we backtracked for 45 minutes and came home. It was a weird day, but still great to be out. Here are some images of the plague:


Flying Ants on the Windshield


Flying Ants on Jon's Truck


Flying Ants Collected from Jon's Truck


Flying Ants Swarming Jon