This was the big adventure day for me. After a breakfast of donuts from a local donut shop that Kris and Terrie like to go to, I left Terry to visit with Kris, while I went off to explore Mammoth Cave (w) .
It's about a two hour drive from Louisville down to Mammoth. I had purchased a tour ticket online the previous evening, and I was running a little late on my drive down, and I was afraid I might miss the tour. Then I discovered that Louisville is in the Eastern Time Zone, but Mammoth is in the Central Time Zone. So rather than being late, I was an hour early!
The Park Service offers several different cave tours, and I ended up taking two of them, which between them covered nearly all of the areas of the cave that are accessible to the public. The two tours added up to about six hours, so there's no way I'll be able to include everything in this log. I'll hit the high points - read the Wikipedia article for more information.
Mammoth Cave gets its name from its size - it's the longest cave in the world. It has over 360 miles of passages, with more being discovered all the time. Only a small portion of the cave is open to the public, and not all of the cave has been explored. One guide said that no one person has explored every portion of the cave.
Another unique feature of Mammoth is that it's mostly a dry cave. The limestone layers, where the caves are located, are covered by a sandstone cap, which keeps water out of the cave. That means that Mammoth has very little of the fancy formations most people associate with caves - stalactites, stalagmites, flowstone, etc.
On the drive into the park, I passed several wild turkeys along the road:
Then I came to the visitor center:
...picked up my tour ticket, spent some time browsing the gift shops (three of them), and joined the group of people waiting for the tour:
When the tour time came, the ranger began by giving us a speech about the physical requirements of the tour - lots of walking, lots of climbing stairs, etc., so anyone with heart problems, breathing problems, etc., should reconsider taking the tour. No one got scared off, so we got on the bus:
...and rode to the cave entrance. Or I should say, one of the cave entrances - there are actually several.
This tour was the one they call the Grand Avenue Tour. At 4-1/2 hours, it's the second longest tour they offer. The longest is 6-1/2 hours, but that one requires hiking boots and kneepads, which I didn't have. (More about that tour later.) Our guide for this tour was Ranger Ty:
...who told me, "If you're gonna take my picture, I get to pose!"
After another safety speech, we went down some stairs to the cave entrance:
...down more stairs:
...and began our trek through many miles of cave passages:
...while Ty regaled us with information about the cave, its formation, its history, etc. As I said, there wasn't much of the usual kinds of scenery you see in caves - mostly just miles and miles of tunnels. The tunnel floors have been smoothed out and "paved" with packed dirt, for easier walking, but the walls and ceilings are just as nature carved them out. Most of the tunnels are wide and tall, as in the picture above. But sometimes the passages got quite narrow, although they were always tall enough for me to walk upright (at least they were on this tour - more about that later).
One thing I did see a lot of was gypsum formations. When water eats away limestone and forms caves, sometimes traces of a soft mineral called gypsum are left behind. These often form in clusters called "gypsum flowers:"
Of course, when you go through the caves nowadays, they give you strict warnings not to touch anything. Alas, 'twas not always thus. In earlier, less enlightened times, there was much less awareness of the importance of preserving the wonders of nature for future generations. And of course, in the days before electric lights were installed in the cave, tourists and their guides would be carrying oil lanterns and candles, which gave off smoke, which is why a lot of the gypsum flowers are gray and black, instead of white. Also, people would "write" on the walls and ceilings of the cave with candle smoke:
Mr. Wallace was apparently a Civil War soldier who visited the caves in 1863. A notation in the hotel register reads "Wad Wallace - drunk." We all had a good laugh when Ty told us that story, but it ocurred to me - what a way to go down in history!
There isn't much life in the caves. At the lowest level - where tourists don't get to go - there are underground rivers, with the usual blind albino shrimp and crayfish. And at one point, Ty pointed out:
A cave cricket
Earlier, I mentioned the 6-1/2 hour tour, which required boots and kneepads. This is a sort of adventure tour, called the "Wild Cave Tour." It's for people who want to try some real spelunking. On that tour, people get to crawl through some REALLY tight spaces. We passed one such space, which Ty informed us was the "Bare Hole:"
...and a little later, we caught up with the Wild Cave bunch, as they were squeezing through another opening called "The Birth Canal:"
...and as we watched, this guy started squeezing through:
No way I would be able to do that. For one thing, I'm enough overweight that I might not be able to get through. For another thing, I have a serious fear of tight spaces. I occasionally have nightmares about them (probably a birth trauma thing).
About halfway though the tour, we stopped for lunch. There's a large room where they've set up a little cafeteria, offering box lunches - sandwich, apple, chips, cookie, drink:
This room is called the "Snowball Room," because gypsum formations on the ceiling sort of look like the aftermath of a snowball fight:
Toward the end of the tour, we came to a part of the cave where the sandstone cap has eroded away. Here, we found some of the usual cave formations:
That last one is something they call "The Frozen Niagara." Of course, these looked much more impressive in person. These really aren't very good pictures, but they're the best I could do with my camera.
After I finished the Grand Avenue Tour, I looked at the park map and decided I wanted to take another tour that covered parts of the cave that the first tour had missed. I chose one called the "Historic Tour." This one only took two hours, and as its name implies, focused more on the history of the caves. Our guide for this tour was Ranger Sue:
...who declined to strike a pose. This time, we went into the oldest cave entrance - that is, the first one to be discovered. Sue assured me that, aside from building the stairway, and clearing out some rubble, they had left the entrance exactly as it was in nature. I can just imagine the first guy who discovered the cave - according to the story, it was a hunter chasing a bear that he had shot - stumbling across this great big hole in the ground!
Outside Looking In
Inside Looking Out
During the Civil War, the cave was used for saltpeter mining - saltpeter being an essential ingredient for gunpowder. After the war, when the mining operations stopped, they just walked away and left stuff behind:
Those aren't railings in that second picture - they're hollowed out logs, used as water pipes.
Sue told us that tourism in Mammoth Cave really took off around 1815, when a hotel was built (it's still there). Of course, back then, there were no freeways or highways, so the cave area was hard to get to, with the result that only rich people with lots of time and money on their hands could afford to tour the caves.
She also said that one of the more bizarre uses that the caves were put to was as a tuberculosis clinic! Some doctor got the bright idea that cave air would help cure tuberculosis patients, so they set up a clinic in one of the large rooms in the cave. It failed miserably.
Earlier, I mentioned the electric lights that have been installed in the cave. On each tour, the guide at one point would turn out the lights, to demonstrate how total the darkess is in a cave. Outside, even on the darkest night, far out in the country away from city lights, with no moon and no stars - even then, your eyes would adjust, and you'd at least be able to make out shapes and shadows. Not so in a cave. There is NO light. You literally can't see your hand in front of your face.
Ranger Sue took the darkness demonstration one step further. She lit a lantern, to show us the kind of light that early explorers and tourists had to work with:
This second tour also featured an area dubbed "Fat Man's Misery," because it's extremely low and narrow. At some points, we couldn't stand upright, and there was one extremely low spot where we had to crouch down and sort of "duck walk" through. Earlier I mentioned my fear of tight spaces - this spot wasn't tight enough to send me into panic mode, but I wasn't too happy about it, and was relieved when I got through it.
One last story about the caves. Some years ago, I watched something on TV - it was probably on PBS - about caves, and I remembered a particularly interesting story from the show. I thought I remembered that it was about Mammoth Cave, but I wasn't sure. Well, along the way, Ranger Ty mentioned the story, and confirmed that it was, indeed, about Mammoth.
I've already mentioned the extreme size of Mammoth Cave. Well, some years ago, the known extent of the cave was much less than it is today. There was another cave system nearby, Flint Ridge Cave, which explorers suspected was connected to Mammoth Cave, but no one had found the connection. In 1972, a party of explorers had penetrated deep into Flint Ridge Cave, crawling through some very narrow passages. They were just about to call it off and go back, but decided to look around one last corner. When they did, they spotted something, and even before they realized exactly what it was they were looking at, they knew immediately that it had to be artificial... because it was a straight line! It turned out to be a handrail. Not only had they found the connection between Flint Ridge and Mammoth caves, but by sheer chance, the connection came into one of the few parts of Mammoth that have been developed for tourists.
After a long day of exploring caves, I drove back to Louisville and picked up Terry. We had a late dinner at a Mexican restaurant, and went back to the motel and went to bed. I was sore for the next couple of days, but it was worth it.