Mammoth Cave National Park

On Friday July 13th, we had an “iffy” weather day and so we decided to head to where it’s 54 degrees and dry year round.  Whatever other weather there might be just wouldn’t matter. 

About 160 miles away in the next time zone over down in Kentucky is Mammoth Cave National Park.  We planned to make a day of the caves. 

So we finally made it down there in the afternoon, got our tickets for the New Entrance Cave Tour and anticipated spending several hours down in the earth investigating and experiencing a very tiny part of this cave which has something like 350 miles of cave mapped out.  It is awesome.  We took a bus through a section of the park and then walked over to what looks like a door right there in a rock in the woods; positively Narnia-like!  When opened you experience a blast of natural air conditioning straight from the Earth itself.  It feels WONDERFUL.  Then the decent begins.  At first it’s a little something like going down the basement stairs only the stairs seem unending.  At home there are 12 stairs down to the basement and this has close to 300 stairs that go down and down and zig zag back and forth and grow quite tight at times.  

The views down here are amazing and are something to be seen in person really.  Photos don’t really do the caves justice.

Looking over and down.  It is very dark down in the caves until the flash goes off.

The lights to the cave are turned on as needed and then flipped off as the area is vacated by the group.  In one of the large sections of the cave where the tour group meets up and has a question/answer session… and a rest… total darkness is exhibited in a way that cannot be reproduced anywhere up above.  Total darkness is… exactly that!

Some places in the cave leave you stooping over a little bit to get through and some places are so tight that you can’t make it through if you’ve got a hat on.  The caves are a beautiful hidden part of this world.

My daughter’s photos in the cave are much better than the ones I took.  I gave up and decided to just take it in.  Marvelous!

Stalactites & Stalagmites… while books were intriguing these are much more interesting in person.

Looking down!

Looking over!

The history of this area is quite interesting.  In the 1800’s there were “cave wars” and people would go in and “do something” (think destroy) to their neighbor’s cave to make their own caves better ones to visit.  Eventually the area was bought by the government and preserved.  This is one of the few National Parks with no fee to get into the park.  This was an agreement made so that the descendants of the farmers who lived here would be able to visit the cemeteries and churches of their ancestors which are contained within the park today.  During the 1930’s boys and young men were hired to go through the area and make it look “more natural” by planting a forest over top of the cleared land once used for farming.  They also went through and put in stairs into the caves, hiring a company which outfitted submarines (think small tight quarters) for some sections of cave. 

After a couple of hours down in the caves we emerged into the heavy air laden with humidity that we hadn’t even thought of as uncomfortable before our trip down into the cavernous earth.  After returning to the car we drove in search of a picnic table and stopped at an overlook, quickly hopping out of the car to view the hills of Kentucky from above this time.  Finding a roadside picnic table we pulled over and made some sandwiches as we munched on carrots and peaches.

Behind our table was a path and as people finished up they left by partners following the boardwalk around a pond, and in spite of the drought it seemed very green and viney here in the forest.

We found many huge spider webs up in the trees.

The pond was full of turtles and frogs, all making nature’s noises of summertime.
With the time change and the longish drive we made it back home around midnight.  A fun & adventurous day!