When I was maybe four years old, my parents took me to Mammoth Caves. Reputedly, I remarked, “Big hole in the ground!”
Indeed. Almost definitively so, one would say…
But Susan had never seen this particular big hole in the ground, though we’ve toured Carlsbad Caverns a few times and we love that cave system. So while we were in Kentucky, we decided to take a day and zoom down to Cave City (no shit — they really named the city that) and see Mammoth Caves…
This is mostly pix. I’m going to try an experiment and use WordPress’s “Photo Album” feature. (Because inserting every picture manually is excruciating in this software.) Feedback welcome on whether that’s a good idea or a bad one. As always, you should be able to click through individual photos to get the full-size view.
-
- One of the new entrances to the cave. You can’t see it in the picture, but there’s a driving rain on. So we spent most of the hike through the cave damp as well as chilly.
-
- Taking photos in a cave without very high-end camera gear is excruciatingly difficult. Most of these pix are basically dreadful, but hopefully they convey some of the space. This is a shot of one of the cave passages and some gypsum formations.
-
- Trying to capture the sense of the space. The place really is immense. This is one of the small passages.
-
- A fascinating passage.
-
- Same passage; different view. Water+stone+time = beauty.
-
- Mammoth cave is actually a “dry” cave — for geological reasons, most of the water is in the very lowest levels. So there are really very few traditional “formations” (stalactites and curtains and so on). This is one of the rare ones.
-
- A gypsum flower, close up.
-
- Another flower.
-
- This is one shot of “Frozen Niagra” — the largest formation in the cave and one of the largest single curtain formations in the country. I couldn’t capture it all without a powerful strobe and a wide-angle lens; this is just a fragment of it.
-
- Looking down Frozen Niagra.
-
- Looking up from underneath Frozen Niagra.
-
- One of the preserved nitrate mining operations from the War of 1812, when cave dirt (i.e., bat guano) was mined and leeched for saltpetre to make gunpowder.
-
- Looking down into the bottomless pit. I assure you that it was considerably more bottomless in the days before electric lighting and industrial steel catwalks.
-
- Part of the Great Vault. This is a truly immense space. It’s something like 180 feet deep. And wide enough that they have an entire catwalk tower running up inside it. This shot was taken from about the middle of said tower.
-
- Looking down into the Vault.
-
- A view of the “natural” entrance to the cave, rediscovered by Euro-descended settlers c 1791. We were particularly captivated by the layer of mist hanging, ethereal, above the cave.
So very cool.