Mammoth Cave National Park had been on my to-do list for a while. So I decided to make a side trip from some East Coast travels to visit the park.
Upon entering the cave, you quickly get an idea of just how large it is. This first room, known as the Rotunda, is huge, and it's not even close to being the…
The people on the path to the left give you some sense of the scale of the passage here. This tunnel is called Broadway.
Continuing through the main entrance hall. The upper portion of the cave was used for mining gun powder during the Civil War. The shelf on the right is called…
Things start to get tighter has we head down a very steep set of stairs. There are 540 total stairs on this tour!
Cave graffiti dating back hundreds of years. It was written using candle smoke. Graffiti is now a federal offense here, but they leave the old graffiti for…
The "bottomless pit" over 105' deep. The original cave explorers, traveling only by lantern light, would have thought it was truly bottomless. They laid a…
Walking through the section known as "Fat Man's Misery". It's definitely a tight squeeze for some folks.
And now the section known as "Tall Man's Misery". You have to walk crouched for a couple hundred feet to get through.
Having reaching the lowest point of the tour, a couple hundred feet below ground, we start heading back up out of River Hall.
Mammoth Dome. A giant vertical shaft formed by an alternate water route. It's hard to get a sense of the scale here, but the shaft is almost 200' tall.
The 155 stairs heading up from Mammoth Dome. Some of the tourists had trouble getting up these stairs!
A look from higher up along the Mammoth Dome shaft.
Back on Broadway on our way out. As you can see, it was a large tour group. The more extreme tours (lantern led, belly crawling through mud, etc) were…
Almost back to the entrance.
The waterfall flowing over the entrance to the cave.
Video of the waterfall, and end to the first tour of the day.