Day 12: Mammoth Caves National Park, KY

This morning’s 6.4 km Grand Avenue Tour through Mammoth Caves was enough adventure to last us for the whole day. This hike was a compilation of several of the short cave tours allowing us to see lots of things at once. We were worried that it would be difficult for the boys with the ominous 1,700 stairs but it turns out that most of the stairs were going down and, while long, the hike wasn’t particularly strenuous. We loved the section going through the slot canyons. Seeing the Grand Canyon, Frozen Niagara, and Dripstones sections were also highlights. The cave cricket superhighway was not a family favourite, lol. Walking through a passageway lined with hundreds of enormous crickets was creepy and Alistair convinced himself that he had accidentally eaten one. I was watching him the whole time - he didn’t.

Devil’s bathtub 

Grand Canyon 

Niagara Falls

Crystal Lake

Cave crickets!

After a lunch of BBQ’d chicken on salad, most of the family passed out for an afternoon nap. Except for Alistair - our Energizer Bunny - he just keeps going and going! Thank goodness for Rainbow Looms, a going away gift from Uncle Brian and Auntie Sarah - they guaranteed the rest of us some much needed quiet time this afternoon. Thank you!

Day 11: Mammoth Caves National Park, KY

Today was a cave extravaganza. We visited two totally different caves and a karst window.

Diamond Caverns was our first stop for an hour-long guided tour in this “show cave”. The tour guide left something to be desired (we didn’t get the impression that he liked his job much) but the cave was spectacular. We cannot emphasize how much this is an absolute must-see. The cave was FILLED with numerous stalagmites, stalactites and columns. Just wow. Incredible.

Cave bacon - see the “fat” strip?

The wedding chapel.

We learned about the Kentucky Cave Wars of the late 1900s, saw the wedding chapel and discovered cave crickets that are so starved for food underground that the males will eat their own legs for nourishment - ugh. We spied many hidden staircases and pathways that we were not permitted to explore. Interestingly, we read that in the 1990s a new part of this cave system was discovered under the main rotunda which has pristine formations but has not been developed and is not accessible to visitors. Weirdly our guide denied any knowledge of this, leading us to suspect there are likely many areas of this cave that are not on the public tour. Even so this was absolutely worth it and was today’s highlight.

Next on our agenda was a short hike to see a karst window, which is where an underground river becomes visible when a cave roof collapses into a sinkhole. Water emerges from the cave system at one end of the sinkhole, is visible above ground as it travels through the sinkhole, and then re-enters the cave system and disappears back below ground. We walked through the sinkhole but the river was mostly dry. It was a cool cave-adjacent geological feature to witness, though Alistair was not particularly impressed.

Alistair: This is it?!

Rim of the sinkhole.

Dry riverbed at the bottom.

Hole where the water disappears back into the cave system.

Our final stop was Mammoth Caves’ Cleaveland Avenue Tour. Mammoth Caves is the longest cave system in the world at 686 km in length. Walking in this section of the cave was akin to walking in a subway tunnel. It was the path of an underground river and it twisted and turned just like a river might above ground, except that this was all below the surface and there was no water flowing through it anymore.

This part of the cave is special because of the gypsum formations (carpets, bubbles, pearls and flowers) on the ceiling. We entered through the “new” entrance made in the 1950s which is near the part of the cave with lots of gypsum. Before this entrance was blasted open, visitors would take the “long” cave tour (about 12-14 hours in duration and guided by slaves) starting from the historic entrance to get to this part of the cave. Given how much trouble the boys had holding their pee on our 2hr tour, thank goodness we weren’t signed up for a 12 hr one.

We did a lot of walking today and are looking forward to seeing more of Mammoth Caves tomorrow.