Mammoth Cave

20 Jan 2025

Welcome to Mammoth Cave National Park!

We arrived in the afternoon shortly before the last cave tour of the day, but our tickets were for the next day, so we ran around the park seeing the clouds that had chased us out of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

There's an excellent exhibit tour in the visitor center that gave us a lot of appreciation for how the caves were formed and the unique habitat they create. Keep this reference handy for the cave pictures from our tour!

We ran around town after the visitor center but there really wasn't that much to see. It looks like the town was hit hard in the pandemic, and we're in the off-season so very little was open. We spent most of the afternoon trying to dry out the tent from the rain the day before and getting a little more organized.

The next day we woke up to snow! There's apparently a giant cold front covering half the US and in Kentucky, that meant an inch of snow. The trees along the road into the park were gorgeous though.

The visitor center sign really spruced up in the snow too.

We started our cave tour by catching the bus to a nearby sinkhole that has one of the entrances to the caves. Sinkholes around the caves are places where the impermeable sandstone roof of the caves are broken up and allow water to flow down to the limestone below which erode away. That erosion is what leads to the caves in the first place.

So into the cave we went. The rangers led us down a very tight, narrow, winding, steep, and probably-a-few-superlatives-I've-forgotten set of stairs 250 feet down in under a quarter of a mile distance. Cory had to squeeze in tight between the walls, but Sara did alright. She definitely didn't have to duck as much.

All along this descent there were formations we saw from the tour yesterday

All of these formations were built just by the flowing of water down the walls and along an underground passage of the Green River.

But all along this early part of the tour we had stunning views of these deep fissures hundreds of feet high that we were literally inside of, sometimes with water still dripping on our heads.

At the deepest point we reached on the tour, we had a quick sit down for a chat with the park rangers and to let the 100+ people that came with us catch up. We had descended 300 stairs to go 250 feet below the surface, and the cavern we entered was shockingly dry but just as beautiful.

Once everyone had caught back up we started up the stairs to head toward the Frozen Niagra section of the cave. We walked through tubes that once held the river before it eroded out a deeper layer to run in.

On our way we encountered an enormous cavern that the river had carved

The Frozen Niagra section of the cave had tons of stalactites in what looked to be a waterfall frozen in rock. It looks a lot like the ice formation we saw at the bottom of the Rainbow Falls in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

We got to take a few more steps down below the formation as well to see how the water formed some stalagmites and a ton more formations in the Drapery Room.

In the center of it all, there was a hole in the ceiling with a small waterfall flowing down deeper into the caves.

Leaving the Frozen Niagra, we were close to the end of the path. But not before seeing a pretty big pond at the bottom of another hundred foot fissure.

We also encountered a formation of rimstone dams that our ranger guide pointed out for us. We almost missed it staring at the stalactites on the other side of the wall. Apparently these dams will have salamanders hanging out in them during the summer months.

Speaking of wildlife, the cave is home to bats, cave crayfish, and crickets, which we got to see up close in the exit tube.

On the way out of the park, we also spotted some more deer; it really feels just like home in the forest around the park. Fortunately, we don't have many sinkholes back home.

Unfortunately, our tour was the only tour of the day and probably the week because of the extreme cold weather which might make the roads impassable. We got super lucky to get a tour in at all. So we headed back to the hotel to pack up and watch the Ravens' playoff game before getting back on the road to our next destination.