Drove to Mammoth Cave, We are staying at Diamond Caves Resort. Our campsite abuts up to Mammoth Cave National Park. The resort has a nice workout room and Jacuzzi, which we tried.
Drove the seven miles to the Mammoth Cave Visitor Center to check out the available tours. We signed up for the Star Chamber Tour the next afternoon. I wanted to go on the Wild Cave Tour, a six-hour adventure, but the only tour of the week was already full. Too bad.
Cave
Took the Star Chamber Tour. Mammoth Cave is the longest cave in the world, 300+ miles on five levels, which have been explored so far. The cave is still alive on the lowest level where the Green River and its tributaries continue to erode away the limestone. The cave remains at 54 degrees as a constant temperature. On the tour we saw the mining operation from 1812 with the wood and artifacts still intact (no decaying in the cave). We saw the Tuberculosis Huts, which was an experiment of Dr John Croghan in the 1840s, where the patients lived for up to six months in the cave.
The Star Chamber is names for the pieces of gypsum knocked off the soot covered ceiling, causing it to look like a starry sky. The guides also turn off all the lights for a couple of minutes to give the visitor the experience of total darkness. All of these sights were on level two of the cave. We then went to level one, where the earliest tours were conducted in the 1820-40s. The tourists paid the guides to write their names on the ceiling using the smoke from candles. The same names are repeated many times. It seems that the caves had many returning customers. Along the passageway are monuments or cairns of stones placed on top of each other. These too were built for the tourists who visited here.
Mammoth Cave, Kentucky - World's Longest Cave Cave
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