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Mammoth proportions - mammoth proportions |
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Written by McClatchy-Tribune
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Wednesday, 09 August 2006 |
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Page 1 of 2
Mammoth Cave is a national park with options.
The sprawling underground playground, a strange and eerie world of blackness, is a park where visitors need to do their homework in advance.
Mammoth Cave National Park in west-central Kentucky offers 13 different cave tours, some of which sell out weeks in advance, especially on weekends and in the summer.
It is the world’s longest cave system, stretching more than 367 miles, going nearly 380 feet below the surface and attracting about 2 million visitors a year, of whom 400,000 actually go underground.
The five-level cave system of limestone has been a major American tourist destination since 1816.
The cave features passageways as wide as highways. There are giant chambers and giant vertical shafts. The cave is largely dry, although there are underground rivers in the deeper levels: River Styx and Echo River. It is a cave with a rich history including mummified bodies and petroglyphs.
The caves were created by rain and carbon dioxide combining to create a weak acid that dissolved the limestone, starting 3 million years ago.
Not far from the Historic Entrance, discovered in the 1790s, is the Rotunda, 140 feet below ground, where slaves mined nitrate. They hauled in logs, built leaching vats and filled them with cave dirt. Water in hollowed-out logs flowed in and brine trickled out, also in old logs. The nitrate crystals were used to make gunpowder.
An underground boulevard, Broadway, leads to an underground gathering placed called Methodist Church, where church services were once held in the cave.
Giant’s Coffin is a large slab of whitish limestone that looks like an oversized coffin.
The Bottomless Pit is 105 feet deep. Looking up, you will see a dome above you.
Fat Man’s Misery is a narrow passage where the rocks have been polished smooth by human contact. You emerge into Great Relief Hall.
The last two attractions are Mammoth Dome — 192 feet from floor to ceiling and carved by water dripping through a sinkhole — and the Ruins of Karnak, gleaming limestone pillars.
Above ground, Mammoth Cave offers 80 miles of trails on and over four wooded ridges and canoeing on the Green and Nolin rivers. There are two canoe liveries outside the park.
Attractions include Sand Cave, where caver Floyd Collins was trapped and died in 1925; Cedar Sink, a giant sink hole; old-growth Big Woods; and Sloan’s Crossing Pond, a pretty wetland.
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