MAMMOTH CAVE 
A Kentucky National Park

While boasting the world's longest cave system, the surface area of this national park covers more than 80 square miles.

No one knows how big the underside is.  So far, more than 365 miles of the five-level cave system have been mapped and new cave systems are continuously being discovered.

Two layers of stone underlie Mammoth's hilly woodlands.  A sandstone and shale cap, as thick as 50 feet in places, acts as an umbrella over limestone ridges.  The umbrella leaks at places called sinkholes, from which surface water makes its way underground, eroding the limestone into a honeycomb of caverns.

Most visitors see the eerie beauty of the caverns on some of the 10 miles of passages available for tours. Rangers dispense geological lore and tell tales about real and imagined happenings 200 or 300 feet down. The tours are hikes inside the Earth.

A popular demonstration done on many cave tours is to have the visitors seated or standing still while the ranger turns the lights off.  It's hard to imagine absolute darkness.  I suppose dunking your head in a barrel of black ink comes close.

Nearly 500,000 folks tour the cave system annually.  Sue and I enjoyed our visit while returning to Ohio after four months of snow-birding in Vero Beach, FL.  We had swung west of our usual route and added the states of Alabama, Tennessee and Kentucky to our list of states in which we have geocached.

I-65 northerly from Birmingham rolled past the park's entrance after our overnight in Bowling Green, KY entroute Louisville and I-71 home.

Cave tours range from the least arduous, a 1/4 mile Frozen Niagara tour to the most difficult, a five mile, six hour belly crawing Wild Cave tour.  If you try that one you will have a clear understanding of the meaning of spelunking!

That's Sue in the top photo as we leave the visitor's center for the staging area of the bus ride to our cave tour's entrance.  The middle photo shows the vastness of some chambers that have been hollowed out by gently seeping to wildly flowing water over geologic time.

The bottom photo shows a delightful example of flowstone where calcium has hardened into the shape of the flowing water that created it.


This one should be on your bucket list!