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| Natural entrance to Mammoth Cave |
At Mammoth Cave National Park, the rolling Kentucky hills remain placid, with a modern visitor center and a clutch of historic cabins (the hotel and restaurant are under renovation). But the real excitement begins when the Historic Tours descend the path from the visitor center to that opening in the hill that goes far underground.
Many years ago I took the Frozen Niagara tour. That shorter tour features some of Mammoth Cave’s more exotic features. But it is not cave tour that made Mammoth famous.
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| Pre-NPS tourism days |
In two hours, the Historic Tour covers two miles, more than 500 steps, and a few narrow spots. Visitors walk in the footsteps of native peoples and the tourists who have journeyed here since the early 1800s.
Mammoth runs almost twice as long as the world’s next-largest cave. More than 420 miles of mapped caves lie within the national park boundaries, so no visitor earns more than a peek at its true scale.
The rangers run through a litany of warnings before we enter, then 100-plus strangers descended the staircase and entered long stretches of dimly lit cave. The first passages are so large, they almost feel manmade, even if water sculpted these tunnels in the 300 million years since a shallow sea covered this part of Kentucky.
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| How it goes today |
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| Some part has to be bottomless |
More recent earthworks along the path were unmistakable. The historic structures in the first mile date to the early 19th century, when white men and Black slaves mined nitrates from the river bottom of the cave to make gunpowder when the War of 1812 shut off foreign sources.
While Mammoth Cave and other caves in south-central Kentucky became tourist attractions, statewide support for national park status for Mammoth grew throughout the early 20th century, especially after a spelunker died after a boulder pinned him in place. In 1941, Mammoth became a national park. The name for the cave comes from its size and massive rooms; while several mummified humans have been discovered, no mammoth bones have been found in the cave.
Tributaries of the Green River have been critical to the formation of Mammoth Cave. Millions of years of floods led significant deposits on its floor. In other cave rooms, markers noted the height of past floods, including a recent one that nearly filled the room. For anyone nervous about rapidly rising water, the rangers cautioned that the marks represented a handful of floods in a century. Plus, the water never rises that rapidly, or so we were told.
Rangers turned off the lights to show the caves darkness without the electricity. Of course, everything went pitch black (the crowd shamed the few people who turned on their cellphone flashlights) until the ranger lit a paraffin candle, providing a bit more illumination.
A modern metal bridge moves tours past the pit and into There was no loitering above the Bottomless Pit, a requirement of almost any cave. Mammoth’s exploration took a giant leap when former slave Stephen Bishop extended a ladder across the pit to numerous wonders otherwise inaccessible. Bishop was a key explorer in Mammoth and led to further discoveries.
Tourists and visitors throughout the years marked the walls with their names, some carving, some burning their names on rocks. Historic vandalism imparts some degree of immortality.
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| Luther Ewing lives on |
I had some trepidation about Fat Man’s Misery, which ran through a mass of narrow rock about hip height. Other than the winding for a few hundred feet, it wasn’t too tough. The crowd kept everyone moving fast.
Then came Tall Man’s Misery, which required some significant crouching. That I navigated the entire Historic Tour without bumping my melonhead once marked a minor a miracle – more realistically, a lifetime of constant head smacks led me to crouch a little further. None of it lasted more than a few hundred yards at a time and no one had to resort to crawling. The tour steps almost all come at once, simultaneously providing dramatic views of one of Mammoth Cave’s tallest structures.
Jaws drop at Mammoth Dome Sink, a dripping passageway that extends up 192 feet and includes a staircase built during the 20th century. The natural width of the passage allowed the park service to construct it without widening the passage. The sink was known in the 19th century but mostly inaccessible until the staircase was constructed.
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| Ruins of Karnak |
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| Mammoth Dome Sink |
Mammoth Dome included the Ruins of Karnak, a series of stone formations that resemble those of Egypt’s ancient temple of Karnak. The pillars would not look out of place in Tolkien’s Mines of Moria. Darkness played with camera settings, and there was not enough light to capture them properly.
During one of the last stops, a bat flitted around, the only cave inhabitant showing itself. Mammoth hosts eyeless fish in some pools and the cave crickets that climb the walls at Frozen Niagara. The natural entrance has slats on either side of its metal security door that allow bats to exit the cave at any time.
Soon we hit the inevitable slash of natural light at the cave entrance. The hill country of the Green River had patches of daffodils following a mostly mild winter. The group dispersed as another waited to enter. Rangers took questions.
The tour made we wish we rented one of the vintage yellow cabins around park headquarters. Two miles is not a long hike, but the bends, twists and stairs to see the most-visited regions of Mammoth Cave more than covered the day’s exercise. As for hiking atop the caves, the hills have ample opportunities for future exploration, not to mention other further touring spots below.
At this national park, the lands above and below do not operate in vacuums. Tempting as it is to view them as separate ecosystems, the hills and caves are intrinsically linked through water, sinkholes and natural entrances.
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| Back at the natural entrance |
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