Sunday morning at 5:15 AM, Kellie and I hit the road for our trip whose final destination was Niagara Falls. However, for us, the journey is more exciting for us than the trip, so I will tell you right from the beginning that the day that we spent at Niagara Falls was probably the least favorite day of the entire journey for me. I will explain later.
We left our house early in the morning and arrived at Mammoth Cave National Park about six and a half hours later. I learned a lot about Mammoth Cave that I really did not expect to learn. Currently, over four hundred miles of caves have been mapped in the Mammoth Cave system. There are over 55 miles of trails in these caves. The whole thing is massive. In fact, the cave got its current name because a visitor in the late 1800's told an east coast newspaper reporter that "You must go to the mammoth cave." I agree! If you are headed anywhere in that direction it is well worth the stop. Like the Grand Canyon and Niagara Falls and other such places, the magnitude and size of the natural formations are awe-inspiring. The woods are not unlike any other woods. The bluffs, creeks, and outside scenery are not unlike any other place, especially here in Arkansas. Any native of the Ozarks will not be wowed by anything above ground. However, the sheer size of the cave is amazing. The trails are wide and navigable. The Historic Trail on which we took a guided tour has a couple of particularly interesting aspects to it.
Fat Man's Misery (sign pictured above) is an area about 200 feet long in which the ceiling of the cave is about four and a half feet high, so, unless you are shorter than four and a half feet, you have to crouch to walk. The problem is that you are walking in a path that is barely a foot wide from the hips down, so you are crouched and leaning sideways. It is a good stomach workout, but not so good for the back. I am not skinny, but I guess I am not fat either because I had no problem negotiating the entire length of Fat Man's Misery.
The other interesting part of our tour was near the end where the Historic Trail for a hundred years or more has ended, and visitors had to backtrack on the same path back to the entrance. Well, the park service changed that by taking down a fire tower from another National Park and reassembling it in the cave so that visitors can climb the fire tower and return to the cave entrance in another level of the cave. Climbing a fire tower inside a cave was pretty cool. Again, I highly recommend stopping at Mammoth Cave if your are in the area. However, I am not sure that I can recommend making Mammoth Cave a destination. Here is why.
First, we arrived at noon on a Sunday and the parking lot was so full that we had to park in the grass far away from the Visitor's Center. People were everywhere. If you draw your energy from being around people, you may love it, but I am an introvert, and I don't like being around people. I hate crowds, especially crowds that are mostly people with young children. Most of the children behaved properly, but a couple of kids ruined our visit through the Mammoth Cave museum by constantly running around and screaming like they were playing hide-and-seek. Kellie gave the youngest one the evil eye once, and the kid quit screaming briefly, but only briefly. I am not sure exactly who or where the parents were, but if I were a Forest Ranger, I would have removed the whole family from the premises. Second, the group that we toured with contained 50-75 people. This was way too many people for a guided tour during which the Ranger talks about the history of the cave. More than once, Kellie and I missed the first few minutes of the Ranger's talk because we were walking at the back of the group. Why not move to the front? Because some young families and a group of particularly obnoxious Indian people of 12-14 people seemed to think that they had to push and claw and shout their way to the front of the group during every leg of the journey. I don't know what their problems were, but they would knock you down to be at the front. I felt like I was in a roller derby until Kellie and I settled for hanging out near the rear. Finally, I have lived my whole life visiting Blanchard Springs caverns with its beautiful limestone formations. Mammoth Cave has no limestone formations. It has no stalactites. It has no stalagmites. It is just big holes in rocks. It is much like a forest with rocks covering your head instead of trees. I remember one wall, poorly lit, that had a flowstone formation, but it wasn't really pretty. Even one the most interesting sights, the Giant's Coffin, (pictured below) is simply a big rock in the shape of a coffin. It is not a formation. I hesitate to say that there was nothing beautiful inside of Mammoth Cave, but it certainly didn't compare in eye-catching beauty with the Dripstone Trail at Blanchard.
Mammoth Cave is open for business 365 days a year according to the information that Kellie and I read. Perhaps, the flow of visitors slows in the winter months. If so, I might recommend that someone make it a destination. Regardless, it certainly is worth being part of a journey if you are headed that way.
From Mammoth Cave, Kellie and I drove through Louisville and stayed in a town named La Grange, Kentucky. The next day, we headed for Kinzua Bridge State Park near Mt. Jewitt, Pennsylvania, where I think I took the most pictures of any stop on our trip. I'll be back in a day or two to tell you about it.
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