Mammoth Cave National Park

 Good morning, my friends. We had a beautiful day for our visit to Mammoth Cave National Park.

There’s a McDonald’s just down the road from the RV park…also a Kroger. Heck you could get just about any kind of fast food you want just a hoop and a holler from where we are. From there, we asked our Nav unit to take us to the national park. Maybe it was feeling in a good mood because it took us on a nice scenic road off the main highway. We saw some barns along the way.

Now take a look at this next one. And what did we learn in Bardstown about barns that are black? That’s right. It’s mold that likes to grow around distilleries. Methinks there’s a hobbiest distiller living in the house associated with this barn. And, it makes sense if you think about it. There are plenty of small scale wineries, and certainly there are a lot of craft beer brewers out there. Why not bourbon? You can also see why this was known as “tattlemold” during Prohibition. If I can spot it, you know those revenuers wouldn’t have been fooled.

It’s very pretty here in Kentucky. It’s easy to see why it’s known as the “Bluegrass State.” It’s green…everywhere. And there is green, green grass growing everywhere too. It must take a small army to keep all the grass mowed. 

We were starting to doubt whether our nav unit knew where it was going when we got off onto a narrow road. We went quite a long distance through this dense forest before coming upon a sign directing us to the park. Turns out we came in through the west entrance, which was a little like coming in the back door.

We had e-tickets, but we were due a refund for being old fogies. All we had to do was show up with our ID and our geezer passes, and they gave us half off the tour we were signed up for. Nice. Things were behind glass here, and so it wasn’t possible to avoid reflections. You can read a description of our tour in the image below. And there were many tours we could have taken. They had me with the word “classic.” It seemed like a good place to start.

We were way early for our tour, and so we spent some time studying the exhibits in the visitor center. I took pictures of the descriptions of these two caves. These are caves Mike and I have seen.

This next image describes what we can expect to see in Mammoth Cave.

I did not know this but Mammoth Cave is the world’s longest cave…some 400+ miles!

The sign above and image below were together. Below is a metallic 3-D model of the cave system.

So we listened to Ranger Jake (who was very funny) as he told us about the journey we were about to take: 2 miles, some 400 feet of elevation loss and then regained; in other words, stairs, 540 steps at a minimum. And here’s where I thank my lucky stars that prednisone helped my hip, because there’s no way I could have done the tour three days ago. I did it yesterday with ease, and with no painful consequences. My hip is still pain-free. Honestly, I’m amazed.

Okay, so here we go down a long ramp to the cave opening. Our group is large at 110 people.

Now we’re descending some steps into the cave. We passed through a cooling breeze at the mouth of the cave. It felt good because it was warm and humid outside. You can see water running down the cave opening there. I don’t know if it runs year-round, but it was running a steady stream.

Inside at the first chamber, it looked like this:

We went down and down a ramp. At times it was low clearance, and we had to duck our heads to pass through.

Now, I want to post a few more signs from the visitor center. It will help you to understand my not-very-good pictures. Read them or don’t. As I’ve said before, I’m not much of a sign reader myself. Mike is my filter when it comes to signs. He tells me which ones I should read.

This one resonates with what we saw inside. It was like walking through a huge tunnel formed by rushing water.

This was one of the first places we stopped. It’s a little hard to see in this image, but those are log pipes. They have been hollowed out inside. They were used to mine saltpetre. It was used to make gunpowder, especially during the War of 1812. There’s a good article from the National Park Service about this.

It isn’t a highly-decorated cave. It’s just immense! In some areas we could barely scrape through, and then in others it was enormous, with deep, deep pits and tall, tall, towers.

The path was easy to follow and there were handrails where we needed them.

I loved this Bottomless Pit. The cave was first open for tours in 1816, and they didn’t know how deep this pit was. They couldn’t hear a rock hit the bottom, and they couldn’t drop anything burning. It would go out before hitting the bottom. As it turns out, it’s about 110 feet deep.

Here, I held my camera out over the hole a little more.

This was another funny passage: Fat Man’s Misery. It was very narrow, and also low clearance in some places.

You can see there’s only about 18 inches from side to side, and it’s shoulder-height on Mike. 

Also, it was very wet and drippy in this part of the cave. You can see Mike’s shirt has some drips on it. We were told those are “cave kisses,” when we visited Lewis & Clark Caverns in Montana a few years back.

In the image below, you can see how low the ceiling was in places. Look in the center of the image. The railing is waist-high, but you can see that the roof is only just a little higher.

There was modern graffiti in the cave too, but this was very old. We saw these kinds of markings when we visited Lehman Cave in Great Basin National Park. And look at that year! 1855!

Here I was looking at a towering wet wall. Water was running like a waterfall.

Here, I was looking up from the same spot. Essentially, we were standing in the middle of a long pit. It extended both above and below us.

This was taken near the same area.

The image below can give you some idea the scale here. Look at the very bottom of the image and in the middle, and you’ll see the path and railings where we would be walking. We went down a lot of stairs.

Our path took us in a loop, and we ended up at the opening where we first started. Now we’re on the inside looking out.

Mammoth Cave has been contaminated with white-nose syndrome in bats. It has wiped out about 90% of the bat population in the cave, which is very sad. Now, visitors to the cave must walk over these soft soapy mats as they leave. It prevents tracking the disease into other caves. Indeed, they were downright obsessive about this at Kartchner Caverns in Arizona. 

Apropos of nothing I could discern, these quilts were on display in the Visitor Center. No explanation their relationship to the cave. Look below the quilts for the sign that describes them.

And it was an excellent day. I got a refrigerator magnet…

AND a shot glass. Yay!

Smitty was darned good and ready to get out of the RV for a walk when we got back.

Sadie likes his walks from the catio. She gets excited when he goes out now because she knows it means treats of appeasement for her.

Smitty has discovered a delicious tuft of ornamental grass growing on the patio at our site. This is some purrimo weed.

And just about as quickly, he got too hot. It was warm and humid. I was happy he didn’t want to stay out long.

As we were getting ready for bed last night, this huge and LOUD rig pulled in beside us. It's a big motorhome towing a trailer with a car and a boat. How do you suppose he gets that boat off the trailer?

So it rained hard last night. We're expecting rain off and on for much of the day. It won't change our plans. We're going to the National Corvette Museum. Also, I have a quilt shop picked out. If memory serves, I haven't visited any quilt shops in Kentucky yet. There's also a brewery I'd like to visit if for no other reason than to get a t-shirt for Erik. It's a tradition. That will probably wait for tomorrow. There is also a historic section of downtown Bowling Green I'd like to see, but the weather may discourage us from that. It should improve tomorrow, and so we'll see how it goes.