7-16-99,
Wild Cave Tour, Mammoth Cave National Park, 5.5 miles
The
drive to Colorado would be a long solo trip, so I needed to break things up a
bit. On the first day I went west to Nashville, and stayed with Buddy and Ellen
Koonce. That left a short drive to Mammoth Cave.
Jean
and I had made our first trip to Mammoth Cave the previous year for backpacking
and the easy cave tours. While Jean isn’t interested in caves (they remind her
too much of her dark childhood bedroom) I am very interested. There’s a lot of
similarity between big caves and the host rocks at the Mississippi Valley-type zinc
mines where I’d been working over the last six years. I’d signed up for the
park’s Wild Cave Tour, hoping for a taste of what exploring a cave would be all
about.
Wild
Cave is a long tour advertised as 6 hours and 5.5 miles. We started at the
Carmichael Entrance. First they gave us all helmets and a bit of training. The
start of the tour was two test loops; the first was a squat and knee crawl, the
second was a long tough belly crawl. One person dropped out even before the first
crawl. After the entrance we caved two short, developed areas, and then arrived
at the Snowball Room, where we could buy lunch in the underground cafeteria.
After visiting Wind and Jewel caves in the Black Hills I was surprised that the
Park Service would allow so much development at Mammoth, but Mammoth had been a
tourist destination long before it was acquired by the NPS. The Snowball Room
had concretions of gypsum on the roof, and I imagined most of the best
specimens were long gone.
After
lunch we had a lot of long walks through the underground equivalent of narrow
slot canyons, barely wide enough for my hips, and typically 6-8’ high. Often the
passages were much lower, requiring a crab walk or knee crawl. Some channels
were very linear, while others meandered like streams. I couldn’t figure out
why the difference.
Neither
of our guides had any particular insight into the geology of the cave. The tour
route was impacted, some obvious holds were worn so smooth that they were tough
to use. The guides had some leeway in selecting their routes, probably a
necessity when it would be tough to judge the ability of the group. We saw more
cave features toward the end, and even used some of the Introduction to Caving
Tour route. The guides said that Wild Cave had more caving, so the Introduction
to Caving Tour might be easier overall.
I took some notes on the route on a park brochure, the transcription is below. I don’t have a detailed map of the cave, so some of the feature names are unconfirmed. It was tough enough to take notes on the route, but I wish I’d been better able to describe the formations.
We
used the Carmichael Entrance (a manmade entrance) and took the elevator to
Cleveland Avenue. We went through the Barehole (the tightest squeeze) then a
rinky dink back to Cleveland Ave. From my reading later I learned that a rinky
dink is a long convoluted route designed to confuse new cavers. Next, Clark’s
Crawl (knees and stoop) to Kathleen’s Crawl, long and tiring belly crawl, led
to the Snowball Room and lunch.
After
lunch was Peanut Butter Alley, named for its sticky floor, past Thorpe’s Pit (the
last feature shown on the park cave map). Thorpe’s led below the discovery
level, and we descended to Lower Boone Avenue. We then did a loop through some
low areas, and took the canyon crawl to the Old Lantern Room. The next few
features were Nelson Pit, Edna’s Dome, and Hanson Pass. I later tried to find
information online about the features I’d noted, but cavers hold their
information closely, and I found little information beyond a few images.
Next
we went to Cathedral Domes, where water was leaking through cracks in the
sandstone cap above. The water must have formed a small lake as I noted
crayfish and camelback crickets. The domes were vertical, very high, and
roughly cylindrical with small flutes on their inside. They were not unlike
some of the high narrow domes in the zinc mines that contained high grade ore.
Next came Becky’s Alley and Greta Grotto with more flowstone, and good hand
holds. Then Lion’s Jaw and Butt Slide. Next was a newer route, Dave’s Lost Sea.
This was the first difficult going we’d encountered since lunch. It was a long
knee and hands passage with some squatting to reach the large Robertson Avenue
leading to Fox Avenue and Big Gypsum Avenue. Our guide then took us off route
to the Spiral Staircase. We climbed a long stretch of breakthrough called the
Compass Needle to reach the paved tour route at Frozen Niagara.
Though
I was used to being underground and climbing through rough terrain, the trip
wore me out. And, I still had to drive another five hours, with a dinner stop,
to spend the night at Mt Vernon, Ill. In another two days I’d get to Colorado
Springs to start the Colorado hiking portion of the trip.
