Day 4 – Mammoth Caves

Today is Saturday 6/3/2017 and we decided to get an early start at Mammoth Caverns.  So we booked a 9:15 am tour.  We are taking the Domes & Dripstones this morning.  Why 9:15 am you ask?  We figured that it is Saturday and most people who work will sleep late and get to the caves around 10:00ish.  Well there were over 60 people on the tour with us.  Oh by the way, no tripods for the camera.

Here is a model representing the cave tunnel system that makes up Mammoth Caverns.  You can see that it is quite extensive and we are only passing through one small sequence of the system.  For our part we will travel about ¾ of a mile through the caves and tunnels.  But there are to 500 steps, some of them steep and it will take us about 2 hours. 

While we wait for the Park Rangers to show up and give us instructions, this bird thought we should be feeding it.  The Park Rangers are here and give there instructions which include encouraging you to not take pictures because it might hold up the group.  WHAT!!!  No Flash photography, okay, but I’m taking pictures.  I have my walking stick – which is okay if it has a rubber tip, but the Ranger says no walking stick, unless you need it.  Of course I need it, I said, for my knee.  Besides it is also my monopod.  Hehehe!

So we begin our way into the cave system and begin our descent and see some of the formations we hope to see more of as we progress.

As we descend we reach one of the landings and move to the next stairs down.  I look over and see where we are headed.  We are in a vertical tunnel in the rock formation and the stairs are allowing us to get to the bottom or at least the next horizontal cave tunnel.

Here is Carmen as we work our way down another set of stairs.  Did I mention that there are about 500 steps?

We pass this formation created when there was a waterfall at this location.  You can see where the water wore out the stone creating columns.  However it was created, it is unusual.

Another picture as we continue to descend.  You can clearly see the little water ways the water created in the rock over the years.  And the stone still looks wet by the sheen. 

We cross yet another vertical chamber.  You can see the walkway on the left side of the picture and the vertical wall to the side.  The chamber continued down for another 40-50 feet and looked similar to that pictured here.  This part was impressive, but we were prodded on and could not “study” the vertical chamber very long.

We were behind the people in front of us, but the people behind us were about 30 feet behind.  So when we finally got off the stairs and into a regular rock tunnel I had Carmen stop long enough to get a picture.  Most of this section of the cavern system was like this rock tunnel with some chambers.

We stopped as a group in this large chamber, which they named “Grand Central Station” because of the number of other tunnels leading in and out of here.  We will continue up those stairs, however, if you were on a cave “crawl” you would be heading left half way to the top of the stairs.  By the way, to get here there were a number of very narrow spots.

We climbed the stairs and continue on our tour passing narrow tunnels and small chambers like this one.  As you can see the tunnels and chambers are mostly just void spaces within the rock with portions of the rock wall or ceiling collapsing.  You can clearly see the rock or sandstone ceiling at this location with some debris under it.

More of the rock walls of the tunnels we passed.  The tunnels are really dark and most of my pictures are in the ½ second or longer exposure.  So as you can imagine many do not look good.  Most of my pictures are near these lights that provide light to walk by.  My only hope is that when whoever chose the light location they gave some thought to the cave visuals.

We come to our next large gathering location.  These are mostly designed to make sure everyone is still with the group because the lights are turned off after we pass.  This chamber is quite large and you can see the ceiling looks like it was manufactured, but it is nature that made this way.  I keep expecting to hear a loud crack and see part of the ceiling come crashing down.  We are headed to that bright light almost in the center of the picture.  That is our tunnel, under the fallen rock shelf.

Here you can see the evidence of the layering of each stratum.  Imagine how long it took to deposit the minerals and sandstone for each layer.

This is not a good picture, pressure to move on and all, but you can see the type of rocks, tunnels, and chamber we were walking through.  We had good bumpy walkways with hand rail for most of the way.

At one of my stops along the way I looked up and saw this fissure (?) in the ceiling.  It looked more like something had been eating the rock.  Time to move on!  Oh that green is algae and the new lighting will help to prevent the algae from growing. 

We are near the end of our tour of the tunnels and get (I think) to the Dripstones section of the tour.  This formation they call Frozen Niagara. 

At Frozen Niagara, a short descent brought us to an area they named the “Drapery” room.  To get here there are an additional 49 steps, down and then back up.  I was told no taking pictures on the steps; like at my age I’m going to start listening. 

At the bottom there are many of the formations other locations call “Bacon” but here they have named the room after the “Drapery”.  I could not get a good picture, since I was told to move along.  This picture from one side of the chamber has a stalagmite and some of the Drapery above it.

As we were leaving the Drapery room and moving back to the exit, water was falling from the ceiling.  Now this is interesting since there was a steady flow of water and it hadn’t rained earlier.  When will this ceiling come down?

Now this is interesting, when we are last leg of the tour and headed out of this section of the caverns, we see formations like this.  This is what I want to see.

Looking up the vertical tunnel you can see where the water has been dripping over the years to create these formations.  This continues up over 40 feet before losing the light.

We get one last look at the flowing formations before leaving the caverns.  For the most part this was enjoyable even if it was not what we thought it would be.  Very different from other cave systems we have visited. 

We are out of Mammoth Caverns and are riding around the area.  When we come to the Green River Ferry.  Here we see this small paddle-wheeler that moves back and forth transporting vehicles across the river.  What the hell, let’s go.  So we crossed, drove a mile or two to a safe place to turn around, and crossed back again.  Neat.

This is the view we have while driving along the roads in Mammoth Caverns National Park.  We did see a deer and a few turkeys, but the cameras were not in hand to take any pictures.

So, after grabbing something for lunch we truck on down the road just for a drive and what do we come across, a Wigwam Motel.  Now I’ve seen them on Route 66 in California and Arizona, but never did I think I would see one here.  What a fantastic find!

And of course we see a number of nice looking barns which I will show you one of them. 

We eventually make our way to Munfordville, Kentucky where we have come to see the Kentucky Stonehenge.  These are massive stones, not as large as the ones in England, but still someone went to a lot of effort to place these here.  Very interesting.

That is it for today and tomorrow we travel to St. Louis, Missouri.  When we get there we’ll visit the St Louis Gateway Arch before heading to our hotel for the night.  Goodbye until tomorrow.