This morning we had a reservation for the 9:00 AM “New Entrance” tour – one of the caves in Mammoth Cave National Park. The park is easy to get to and must be more crowded in the summer months. Even so, some of the tours were sold out.
The “New Entrance” tour sells out at 118 people. There was quite a crowd, probably close to capacity. The whole lot of us boarded three old school buses for the five minute ride to the cave entrance. Katie and April were our ranger guides.
Once in the cave we spent almost two hours underground. The short (quarter of a mile) hike was mostly stairs … almost 300 of them … taking us 250 feet underground. At one point, at a place with benches call “Grand Central Station” Katie turned out the lights so we could see how pitch dark it was in the cave. It was a cool 55 degrees and, besides lots of rock, we saw at least one bat. The stalagtites and the stalamites came near the end of the tour with a formation they have dubbed “Frozen Niagara”.
I liked the hike, being underground and seeing all the rocks and formations. It just seems amazing for it to be there and be so solid. You’d think that it would cave in on itself eventually. But you don’t really want to think too much about that while you’re underground. 🙂