Mammoth Cave National Park

6/2/09

Hit the road at 9 this morning and got to Mammoth Cave National Park around 11:30. Found myself a campsite, and got the tent set up just in time for a 20 minute downpour. I've never heard thunder like I've heard it in Kentucky. Intensely loud cracking like a giant bundling up a few redwood trees and snapping them like toothpicks. The storm helped me take a much-needed nap, and now I have my first cave tour in 20 minutes. I am pumped.  

My first cave tour today was an easy stroll through this wonder of a natural spectacle. Words can't describe it's beauty and apparently neither can pictures. Because the cave is so vast the flash from a camera didn't really help much, so pictures don't really work out. But a few did.

This is the bottomless pit. It's 105 feet deep. It was termed bottomless from the first cave explorers who looked down it with simple lanterns, making it look like the entrance to the center of the earth. 

Other notable places in the cave included the rotunda (the largest open room in the cave system), the old salt vats of the mining operations, and the methodist church. 

The methodist church was a spot in the cave where in the 1800's a local preacher took church goers to worship. Why a cave? It's a constant 50-some degrees in there, much better than a packed little chapel reaching the 90's on the surface. The preacher would lead the parishioners down the cave to the large chapel room. From there, he would take everyone's lantern and place them on a ledge to backlight him as he spoke. Black stained rocks mark where these lanterns sat. The preacher's sermons would sometimes last up to 4 hours, yet everyone stayed the whole time because this crafty preacher had all their lanterns placed behind him. Without that light, it's a treacherous and close to impossible walk back out. Who would be bold enough to interrupt the word of God, walk up behind the preacher, and say "sorry Father, I've had enough."

As we continued another hundred feet down we encountered "Tall Man's Agony," a long corridor of a four-foot-high ceiling, and "Fat Man's Misery," similar to the Agony but horizontal instead of vertical. Also, pictured at right, was the giant's coffin, eerily shaped and colored like the coffin of Paul Bunyan. 

The cave is full of wonders, each with a story attached. All along the route were scribbles of graffiti, most from the mid-late 1800's. Our guide, Kaite (who looked like the Ting Ting's Kaite White), told us that any graffiti prior to 1941 is historical graffiti, anything written after that is a federal offense. 

This historical graffiti is quite interesting, most of it done by burning dots into the rock with candle flame.  The most interesting to me was a burned etching from 1855 when the first band played in the cave. Just a few yard from the tunnel where their name has lasted centuries, is a room in the cave with incredible acoustics. Back then, bands would perform in the cave often to a crowd of lantern holding spectators. 

The cave tour was magnificent. I didn't want to resurface. Mostly because it was ranging in the 90's with I'm assuming close to 90% humidity. From the entrance of the cave, you can feel both the heat of the surface and the wonderful cool air of the cave. You can also see the fog created from the meeting of the two. 

I went back to my site and made a delicious pineapple and ham "pie." It must have smelled good too because I had about five guests for dinner. A little herd of deer kept a safe 20 feet away as this sniffed in my direction and I threw them a few scraps. 

My night finished with the burning down of the campfire and a few songs on my guitar. Until tomorrow's cave spelunking!