Mammoth Day

Nancy wanted to do something special for her father's 85th birthday. He's always up for an adventure, and a day trip seemed in order. She kept it a surprise to ensure he studied his atlas to decipher our destination. By the time of the trip, he figured it out. 
 
The original pick, Tennessee's Dunbar Cave near Clarksville, fell through because white nose syndrome affected the cave's bats, leading the state to close them. So we decided on another underground spectacle for Plan B: Mammoth Cave National Park, just north of Bowling Green, Ky.

For five years, I have lived just 90 minutes from a national park and never visited. From Murfreesboro, the drive took less than two hours. Miles from the interstate, the park sat along a series of hiking and horse trails. On its surface, the world's longest cave complex gives away little. The green mountainous countryside of southern Kentucky holds its own beauty. Small mountains and river gorges hemming the park.

Driving up the visitors center, we encountered this deer grazing placidly. The deer had little fear of people, but appeared scrawny and malnourished, a possibly consequence of this summer's triple-digit heat and drought. But I could be wrong. Female turkeys were also common on the park grounds, usually peeking out from the forest's edges.

Mammoth Cave is free even if its tours are not. Wisely, the park service offers tours ranging from easy to challenging, for the elderly and the experience spelunker. Most fill up far in advance. With a week's notice in September, we were fine for three spots on the Frozen Niagara Tour. 

On this late summer weekend, the park hummed with activity. We milled around before the Frozen Niagara Tour, a shorter jaunt through limestone passageway. We walked some of the trailed and visited the Historic Entrance. Wide and deep, it took only a few steps down for the brisk cave to lower the temperature by 15 or 20 degrees. White nose syndrome made its mark on Mammoth; disinfectant mats at each cave entrance intended to reduce the chances of it reaching Mammoth's bat five bat species.

Standing at the Historic Entrance

Park rangers bussed visitors out to the respective cave entrances. It was miles from the Historic Entrance, although someone with time and the skill could navigate the caves from one to the other. I volunteered to back up the group and give the range all-clear signs. The first task involved locking the door and sealing us into Mammoth's hidden world.

 As we stood  and listened to the ranger's description of the rock formations, stalactites dripped at differing speeds and silent crickets crawled across the ceiling, the floor, and pretty much where they wanted.

Frozen Niagara comes from the main formation's resemblance to the waters of Niagara Falls. While not anywhere on the scale of those falls, Frozen Niagara does resemble water frozen in motion.  A staircase took us beneath the formation. Mammoth Cave is a place where a spoonful weighs a ton - all those little drips of groundwater working through the limestone led to this enormous cave. We only saw a small portion, not even the standard tour, but its formations repeatedly impressed.

Stalactites along the Frozen Niagara tour.

To cap off the visit, we hiked down the Green River Bluffs Trail for some exquisite views of the quiet river. The river forms the northern boundary of the cave system and where its underground rivers drain. At the viewpoint, the river twisted, drought still evident on wide bars dividing it into channels. A group of canoes passed dozens of feet below us.

We faced a steeper hike back along the bluffs. 
A cluster of five  deer appeared on our return trip. They barely paused their foraging to eye us. Protected from hunting, they had no reason to fear.

At her Dad's request, we grabbed lunch at the diner at the park complex. The crowds thinned after the heavy schedule of tours around noon, and we were among the day's last customers. The coffee shop felt like a throwback, serving comfort food and delicious cobblers with ice cream.

Mammoth might be the best type of hole in the ground. In its way,. Mammoth Cave lives, continuously evolving, continuously building up stalactites and stalagmites, and breathing out air around 54 degrees, with new caverns growing all the time. Plus, we can visit again without treading the same steps, nor can we see those steps we already took.