After turning from the paved path to a lower road, we meandered into a cave entrance. I fell in love with the water dripping from the top of the large cave, creating green growth and a small stream. The same water flow helped to create the caves thousands of years ago. Enchanted, Ana and I skipped down the stairs and into the cave. We walked back a solid few yards until a door of wood and Plexiglas stopped us. We turned around made our way up to the tour's start, promising to return to the nearby trails.
The Historic Tour caps at 120 people, so we head a large group, but after starting the back, Ana and I skipped up to the front of the group. Our guide was the fourth generation of rangers in his family and told us this in the most adorable Southern accent. (There were a lot of those in Kentucky.)
Because we took the Historic Tour, we started from one of the seven natural entrances to the caves. As it turns out, Ana and I had discovered it, and we went behind the door that I had determined was "not for us." Very quickly, we ended up in a huge cavern that still held the remains of a saltpeter mine. I didn't know, but most of the crowd was able to answer our guide's question : saltpeter makes gun powder. From 1812-1815, Mammoth caves produced the saltpeter for the gunpowder used in the War of 1812. The actual gunpowder was produced by DuPont in Delaware. When a woman asked about what happened to production during "The War," the guide stayed in his own place and answered about the War of 1812; she had meant the Civil War. However, the North-South divide did not bother the saltpeter mine; it had stopped production after the War of 1812, and Mammoth Cave was now used for tours. Since Kentucky was divided for the war, I wasn't surprised to hear that Northern and Southern people took tours during that time.
A tour of the caves was a big deal, so ladies would come in hoop skirts, high heeled boots, and corsets. In later years, rangers found discard boots and corsets in the passages. That's not all they found either : while our guide only told us about one mummy found in the cave, when I poked I discovered that other bodies had been found, preserved by the refrigerator-like climate of the cave. The story we got centered around a Native American who had died in the cave in the 4th century B.C.
Our tour group heard the story of the mummy when we had made our way to another larger cavern. After telling the story, our guide turned off all the lights (the caves are lit; the rangers in front and back pressed buttons as we went) and we had a moment of darkness in the cave. It's the complete darkness you can only find in a place like that -- if you hold your hand in front of your face, you can't see it, though your mind wants to find the outline. We had a couple of slower people in the group, though, who had to be told to turn off cameras at this point.
After submerging ourselves in darkness, we began the fun part of the hike. We climbed down narrow stairs, wound around various passages, and admired the formations of the rocks that spiraled and piled and toured in ridges and pillars. One passage, called "Fat Man's Misery," took us through a narrow gap, barely as wide as my hips, and sometimes not even. It led to a low passage, just lower than the one I described in my previous post, where even I had to duck. Then we took a brief respite and waited for half the group to catch up. I realized here that I needed to be up the front of the group. I would be very claustrophobic and impatient in the middle of a slow-moving group.
From our break, we headed up flight after flight of stairs into the "Dome," a high room that doesn't naturally let people climb it; they had to build a whole lot of stairs to help with the exit. I barely noticed the stairs though, because at each landing another sight of rocks towering like cathedral spires.
From the Dome, we came into the Audubon passage that resembled a Subway tunnel. We ended the tour there, with talk about "cave sings," when musical groups give a holiday concert in the caverns. Ana and I explored a trail afterwards, finding the Green River and the River Styx, which flowed out from underground. Yay, classical allusions!
In a final education note, the Native Americans mined gypsum from the caves. No one knows what they used it for. We use it for dry wall today. Also, it is used in Twinkies.
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