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Columbia, KY → Mammoth Cave National Park → Nashville, TN 161.0 mi (259.1 km) |
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It’s a big day, everyone!
Mammoth even! Today, I’m visiting my 200th national park site, a UNESCO World Heritage site, and the longest known cave system in the world: Mammoth Cave National Park!
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As soon as I walked into the visitor center, I was flabbergasted! No one was wearing masks, even the rangers! I felt like I’d walked into an alternate universe after two years of COVID-19, but as I found out, the National Park Service changed their requirements just yesterday! Now, only parks in high-spread areas are required to mask up! It was still a weird feeling being in an unmasked crowd, so after taking a peek at their model cave, condensing all 420 miles of surveyed tunnels into a single view, I went for a stroll outside to wait for my tour to begin!
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My first stop was the historic cave entrance, which was most likely how ancestral tribes first found it over 5,000 years ago. They, like future visitors, mined minerals like gypsum and epsomite here, but modern interest in the cave began with a very similar story to Timpanogos Cave: a young boy named John Houchins, pursuing a bear, found a cave instead! Since the late 1700s, folks have been coming back to this entrance to explore, to mine saltpeter, to treat tuberculosis, and most recently, to study and tour!
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Beyond the historic entrance stretched the River Styx Spring Trail. Aboveground, Mammoth Cave National Park boasts over 60 miles of hiking trails, and well, with a name like River Styx, this one was definitely something to see before my 9:45 Domes & Dripstones tour!
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The River Styx Spring is fed by limestone sinkholes, which fill with water then drain into the cave. After flowing up to 7 miles underground, the river empties out here before flowing into the Green River! Before it emerges, this water is home to all sorts of unique species, from blind cave fish to crayfish to the endangered Kentucky cave shrimp!
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I couldn’t stay long because I had to check in for the bus! Phone reception was spotty, but the ranger was very nice and let me board even though my ticket wouldn’t load! Masks were still required on the buses, even though they were not required in either the visitor center or the cave, which made no sense to me, but in any case, we were soon on our way to a much, much smaller cave entrance in a sinkhole!
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It soon became clear that this was not a place to wander at leisure like Carlsbad Caverns. There were 280 stairs down into the cave, the paths were very narrow, and there was a ranger both at the front and the back making sure everyone kept pace to meet our bus on the other end! The no-tripod policy meant photos along this dimly lit path would have to be taken on an as-possible basis!
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Really, this felt more like a tunnel tour than a cave tour. I was expecting a lot more formations, but most of the 1.5-mile walk was just squeezing through gaps and chatting with fellow visitors about their states’ COVID policies! That’s because this section of the cave has been used and abused for over a century by mining operations and early tourism! For this reason, the ranger explained, this was going to be one of the last Domes & Dripstones tours for a while! They were going to close it off to add newer, better trails to accommodate a number of visitors that the first trail builders never imagined! I sure got lucky to sneak in on this one!
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The crowd gathered in a huge room called Grand Central Station, where the ranger told us about the Cave Wars of the early 20th Century! See, the more Mammoth Cave got mapped, the more folks realized their farms were sitting on top of caves. The more they realized they were on top of caves, the more they realized they could make lots of money off of tourism! The first of these private show caves opened up around the start of the Civil War, and each owner went to great lengths to beat the competition, even hiring fake police officers to warn visitors of a cave-in where they were going and that the safer bet was to visit the closer cave instead! Though many of these caves had better, more accessible, formations than Mammoth Cave, they had to compete with Mammoth Cave’s reputation and location, a make-or-break enterprise!
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At last, after walking up a series of stairs and ramps, the group finally came to the crown jewel of the tour, Frozen Niagara! Some tours only go to Frozen Niagara, a spectacular dripstone formation, and its adjoining Drapery Room! For being so popular, though, it was a super hurried experience. Folks could file down into the Drapery Room, snap a couple of photos, and file back up again! I barely had enough time to whip out my Flutter Phone and turn it around the room!
And then, just like that, we were up and out of Mammoth Cave! That was it! Everybody boarded the bus again and headed back to the visitor center. It was a little underwhelming, though I probably could have taken a longer tour with more time, like kayaking the River Styx. Instead, I had to get back down to Nashville to catch my 3:45 flight back to Burbank, bringing this exploration of Tennessee and Kentucky to a close!
I’ll see you at Park 201!
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Total Ground Covered: 1,263.8 mi (2,033.9 km) |
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