Mammoth Cave National Park

I can’t think of a better way to have spent my birthday this year than in a national park. I did just that two Mondays ago on December 17 when I visited my fourteenth park of the year: Mammoth Cave National Park in Central Kentucky.

I chose the Historic Entrance tour of the cave, a two hour expedition traversing roughly the same underground route visitors had for the past 150 years. Guided by a park ranger, about 20 people including myself entered the cave--the world’s longest with over 392 miles of explored passages--through its grandest natural entrance then descended on foot nearly 300 feet underground.

Upon entering the cave, we found ourselves in a huge, circular room called the Rotunda. The Rotunda long ago housed a potassium nitrate or “saltpeter” mine, which was used to make gunpowder. The Mammoth Cave mine was most active in the early 1800s and furnished a significant proportion of the gunpowder used by the United States in the War of 1812.

Continuing deeper into the earth, our ranger told us more about the cave’s natural and human history. There are hardly any stalactites and stalagmites in the cave because a sandstone and shale cap prevents water from seeping through cracks in the rock. There are, however, numerous gypsum deposits. While the torchlight from tours long ago turned these once pearly white patches black, prehistoric Indians are believed to have collected the gypsum 5,000 years ago and used it to make body paint and trade for other goods.

While there are hardly any stalactites, there is no shortage of memorable rock formations and passageways. After passing Giant’s Coffin, an enormous chunk of white rock, we passed Bottomless Pit before entering Fat Man’s Misery, a low, narrow passage that finally opens up into an area known as Great Relief.

At many junctures of the cave, the walls are covered with names and initials of past visitors. Long ago, tourists would pay guides to stamp their names on the ceiling with a burning candle. I asked the ranger leading our tour if the National Park Service had ever considered washing off this graffiti. He said it had not because the markings are part of the cave’s history.

The final and most epic part of the tour was Mammoth Dome, a spectacularly-chiseled 192-foot shaft. We entered the Dome at its floor and climbed a metal staircase erected in its center leading back to the Rotunda and the cave exit. Stephen Bishop, a slave who was the first to explore much of the cave in the early 1800s said this was his greatest discovery.

While the cave is the park’s main draw, it is not the only one. Everyone else in our tour group returned to the visitor center after exiting the cave, but I decided to explore the golden woods growing atop the cave. A short trail leads to the banks of the Green River, where steamboats used to ferry tourists to the park. A little further along, River Styx flows out from under the ground and meets the Green River.