Nearby Wonders: Mammoth Cave
There are tons of awesome places to go and sights to see around Nashville, so this weekend, a few friends of mine and I decided to trek drive 1 hour and 40 min from good ol’ Nashville, TN all the way to Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. It was an awful hot and humid midsummer day, but we managed to escape the heat in the cool cave air!
We left our car exposed to direct sunlight in the Visitor Center’s parking lot and then went into to purchase our tickets for the Historic Tour. (Check out all the options here) Mammoth Cave is the longest known cave system in the world and has everything from giant caverns that seem large enough to hold a basketball game and a large crowd and deep pits and tall ceilings to small crawl spaces where you can go spelunking with a guide. The Historic Tour that we went on is kind of the general tour for people who are willing to spend a couple hours underground. There are shorter tours that are perhaps a better fit for younger children, the elderly, and people who are not in the best shape…but the Historic Tour is pretty ideal for the standard overview of the cave system. There are other tours like the River Styx Tour during which you can visit the underground rivers and lakes to the Snowball Tour where you can see cool mineral “flowers.” The cool thing is that none of the tours are that expensive, so it’s a great place to explore for a day trip with a few friends!
During our tour, we saw some awesome cave features like, the Bottomless Pit…
…an area a bit narrower than most called Fat Man’s Misery…
…and graffiti all around that was, as our guide said, “either historic or a felony”…
We ended the day by climbing up the “tower” of at least 100 stairs in this extremely tall cavern…
At one point, our guide even turned off all of the electric lights in the cave and then demonstrated what it would be like if your oil lantern were to go out. “This is what all of Mammoth Cave looks like,” she announced to the chuckles of the crowd. At the end, we finally made it back to the Historic Entrance, after 2 hours underground, and saw natural light again!
Because the cave had cooled us down very comfortably, we decided to brave the heat and hike a short ways down to see the Green River and Styx River spring. The humidity and sunlight attacked us, but it was worth it to see the cool blue waters of a cave river meeting an above ground one. Then, after a sweaty hike back to the parking lot, including a stop back at the Historic Entrance to feel the natural air conditioning of the cave, we were on our way back to Nashville!