Giant Animals, Mammoth Caves, and Mega Caverns

The family drove about five hours south on US 31 to Barren County, Kentucky, to Mammoth Cave National Park and took a tour of the caves. Then they took two more the next day. It was interesting.

There is one element of advice I gleaned  from the travel writing section of a “How to Write” book, which I try to utilize when writing this blog. The advice is that travel writing, to be more than a guide book, must have a soul, it must tell of a connection-or disconnection-of the author and her experiences in the place to which she travels. It must illustrate the mark it leaves, or fails to leave on the writer’s perceptions. To be the least bit interesting, it should be personal. 

Many times as I re-read these travel blogs, I am repeatedly appalled by 1) the typos and grammar mistakes, 2) at times, the drudgery-filled tedium of trying to record every move and stop and thought, and 3) the fascinating writing which shines, like tiny pins of light, through the expanse of word-tedium. 

My goal, in every case, however true I keep to it, is to avoid giving the reader a dry, running commentary on what, where, and how, but to present a vision of travel-however mundane, domestic or international-through my faulty perspective. Sure, it may be a helpful read if you want to go where I have gone, but there are shorter, easier-to-read guides on the internet. 

It is almost 2020 and I find myself with no blogs ready to publish about my travels from 2019. I have started three or four times, trying to capture the right angle, begin with a bang or a whimper …  but alas ... nothing yet. I am determined to write about my 2019 travels, if only in small one-page vignettes of my experiences, because although my inspiration may not have been strong, nor the impressions I took away significant, Bjorn composed some great pictures that will say what I felt much better. So, let’s try this again. 

Giant Animals, Mammoth Caves, and Mega Caverns 

“Oreo cows!” Astrid exclaimed as they traveled south on US 31. She pointed and yelled it again, a little louder so Snorri would hear through his headphones. There was a herd of cows grazing the newly green grass of an Indiana highway-side pasture, their black fronts and black back-ends sandwiching their pure-white midsections. The family rarely drove this highway, so Astrid kept an eye out for new and interesting sights. Oreo cows were a relatively exciting visual find. Snorri glanced back with a bored expression. 

“What? You don’t see black and white cows like that every day,” Astrid said.  

A half-hour or so down the road, another visual treasure popped up. 

“A giant chicken … rooster? Yes, rooster,” Astrid exclaimed again and tried frantically to find her phone to take a poor picture of the oversized cement poultry as they sped by.  Probably a chicken farm, she thought. She had stopped trying to get Snorri or Bjorn in on the roadside hunt. 

For years before this, Astrid would suggest Mammoth Cave National Park as a destination, but it always lost out to other choices. But now, it was the last few days of Spring Break 2019 and they were headed to tour the many large empty spaces Mother Nature had carved out under western Kentucky. 

“Aaaand a giant cow …” she said out loud as they passed a giant cement bovine. “I’m sensing a pattern here. Giant animals.” 

The visual theme did not end when they turned off Highway 65 South at Cave City, Kentucky, and headed toward Mammoth Cave National Park. A few yards down the road, gigantic cement dinosaurs heralded the existence of Dinosaur World, a dinosaur-themed amusement attraction nearby. 

Bjorn had signed them up for three tours of the caves, one on Thursday and two in the morning on Friday. After touring the gift shops and bathrooms and literature stands in the visitors center, a red-headed ranger name Rachel lead them down into the gaping mouth of the cave. To Astrid, who loved to soak in her surroundings, noticing and contemplating every stick, stone, and fungus, the tour was a speed-walk through a unique, jaw-dropping natural phenomenon. So it was a good thing that the trail was a well-groomed, paved path, so different from the large-rock lined mines Snorri and Astrid toured in the Upper Peninsula (UP) of Michigan the previous summer. 

Rachel stopped at certain locations in the mine to give historical facts, figures and tales to the group of varied cave-visitors. The first one was the place where salt-peter was mined during the Civil War (for the South). There were plenty of ants-in-the-pants kids on the tour, one with an obnoxiously bright headlamp which, of course, was shone everywhere except in front of him. 

One similarity these magnificent caves shared with the UP mines was the invasion of a fungus called White Nose Syndrome, which effected bats. Because this fungal disease has such a potential to reduce bat populations, all visitors to the mines in the UP and to Mammoth Cave had to walk on mats with disinfectant before entering and leaving the caves. 

Many of the cavernous underground rooms looked very much like people dug them, but they didn’t; it was all Mother Nature's slow, steady work. The tour took them through a narrow, swerving area, a low, duck-your-head area, then up a many-storied staircase to the surface again. 

After the tour, they checked into their Air BnB in Glasgow, a 200+ year old hotel-like house. They let themselves in with the provided key, a little worried about the viciously barking dog on the other side of the door, but once the little guard saw that we were, in fact,  humans, he quieted down and let them settle in their room on the second floor.

Colten’s Steakhouse in Glasgow, was full of locals out for dinner. It was typical steakhouse, with taxidermied cattle horns and fish on the walls.  

“Boy, it’s been a while since we’ve been here, I forgot the accent is so different,” Astrid remarked after Bjorn had to have their home-grown waitress repeat a few things due to her beautiful Kentuckian accent. Bjorn and Astrid had lived in Lexington, Kentucky (east of Glasgow), years before. It was where Olaf the White was born, but they had never had the chance to visit Mammoth Caves. 

The next day, after a hearty breakfast, they checked out of their bed and breakfast, then drove past the giant dinosaurs along the road to Mammoth Cave (again),  back to the visitors center to wait to take two more tours.

Their second tour took them, by dark green bus, to an entrance at another part of the park. It was led by an older, more bearded ranger, who emphasized preservation of historical artifacts and added more  more interesting and detailed historical facts about the caves. Although Mammoth Cave National Park had trails underground, there were also extensive trails above ground across their property, in addition to a campground.

The third and final tour, The Violet City Lantern Tour started with the rangers handing out gas lanterns, as they would be the only light available in some parts of the mines, as all the electric lights would be turned off. 

“If you are sixteen years old or younger, you must stay within arm’s reach of your parent,” the tour guide said before they set off. 

“What if your child is bigger than you,” Bjorn asked. Snorri had grown taller than Astrid. He liked to hike in the middle of the tour group, but Bjorn liked to be at the end, to take pictures. Astrid liked to know where Bjorn and Snorri were at all times because there were cliffs, rough areas, pointy sharp rocks and lots of darkness. Also, this trail involved more than a few challenging inclines and rough trails.

As sometimes happens, the best was saved for last. This three-hour tour took visitors off the paved trails, onto the dusty, dry stony paths that weaved in and out of huge, nature-made caverns which the guide explained were, at one time, filled with pre-historic artifacts. The ancient inhabitants of the area would go in and scrape magnesium sulfate off the walls and use it for medicinal purposes. At another time, when medical science was burgeoning, little huts were built down in the caves to house tuberculosis patients. Doctors theorized that the dark, cool moist environment would benefit the afflicted. The patients never improved and often died down there. 

In the infantile stages of cave tourism, in the early 20th Century, the cave's owners would allow visitors to take cart-fulls of ancient artifacts home from the caves. Decades of tallow soot and controlled graffiti covered some of the cavern ceilings and walls. The thoughtless abuses to the caves, done with profit in mind, made Astrid wonder what thoughtless, destructive things we may be doing to our cherished natural sites today. Will the future generation tut-tut and shake their head in disbelief when they visit places we are inadvertently marring today? 

On the tour the day before, Bjorn was having trouble getting good pictures which was not hard to believe, since taking good pictures in a cave lit by reddish lights was a challenge. But on the Violet City Lantern tour, there was some hope. He hung back at the end of the line of tour group, and stayed back as long as he could, to get photographs of fiery trails of the lanterns marching through the caverns. The last part of the tour ended in a cavern with a small “leak” in the ceiling, which one of the rangers lit up with a light as the tour walked past. 

 After the last tour, they were bussed back to the visitors center, walked through disinfectant pads and left the mostly underground national park. 

Driving Kentucky highways brought back memories for Astrid. Memories of cars disabled and stopped, sometimes in the middle of the road. Kentucky, like Michigan, doesn’t have auto-inspection laws, so Astrid assumed people just drove their cars without maintenance, until they broke down on the side of the road. The passed a gold Lincoln, its front wheels sitting on cinderblocks, and farther down the highway, a lonely boat. 

Another forgotten trait of traveling Kentucky’s highway was the speed. Although the posted speed limit was 65 mph, all the cars were going 80 mph or more, necessitating speeding along with them, or becoming a traffic hazard. Kentucky was a beautifully hilly place, and the highway moved with the landscape, curving around hills, following streams. 

They checked into a Hilton Tru in Shepardsville, Kentucky then had dinner at Cattlemen’s Steakhouse, a crowded and popular place that night. At 7 am in the morning, a fire-alarm threw them all outside, to await firemen and fire, smoke, and traumatic excitement, but it never came. Someone had left a bagel in the toaster and it was burning up, the consequent smoke setting off the fire alarms.

Before setting off for Michigan, they stopped in Louisville {LOO-VILLE}, at the Louisville Mega Caverns. 

An old entrance to Mega Caverns when it was a mine

Until the city passed a law which forbade mining under land that a mining company did not own, it was a limestone mine. But, since the part of the land above it is owned by the state (it's a highway) and the Louisville Zoo, mining was stopped. In a move of innovation, the owners charged construction companies to dump non-compostable building waste (because decomposition in a closed space is not a good idea) in it to raise the floors by 20-ish feet, then rented out the constant-temperature space for storage–road salt, movies, wine, cheese, boats, RVs, and some other items that were unable to be disclosed.

In a few of the cavernous rooms, they set up a series of ziplines. Another zipline course webbed its way throughout the mine, with tourists zipping over dark voids with only headlamps to guide them. But the family wasn’t there for ziplining. They hopped on electric bikes and, in the head-lamp-lit darkness, whirred after their tour guide who stopped and gave informative speeches at a handful of sites. 

One site, illustrated by poised mannequins and army cots, was about the Cold War plans to have the mine serve as a fall-out shelter, but it was a good thing they never had to use it. After the Cold War ended, they calculated that it would never have provided enough oxygen for the amount of people it was to hold. Other sites illustrated the mining process. 

"They call it a mine."

Of course, no underground tour would be complete without experiencing total darkness, the darkness that exists deep underground where no light can penetrate. Astrid experienced this before, in the Hawaiian lava tube, Mammoth Caves and in the mines in Michigan’s UP. It always induced a sort of panic and started her thinking of ways in which she would find her way out of the darkness. But her plans for defeating the darkness were always foiled by the click of the light switch again.

Astrid looked out for visual gems along the way home, re-seeing the large cow and chicken, but she was also contemplating the underground things she saw. It was a trip to check one more National Park off the list, a unique one. Their last stop was at a very crowded, but efficient Chick-Fil-A in South Bend, Indiana, then home to Michigan.  

After years of suggesting it as a destination, Astrid had finally been to Mammoth Cave National Park. It was interesting, but the whole experience echoed past impressions of other natural attractions which were, in essence, large, open spaces. Large open spaces of significance which she visited in the past include The Grand Canyon, the Yosemite Valley, Meteor Crater, the Thingvellir continental divide and lava tubes in Hawaii just to name a few. 

In her limited travels, she noticed humans were attracted to just a few categories of earthly wonders: water (bodies or falls), voids and the structures that define them, rocks, heights, or superlative organisms (like trees) and/or a combination of two or more of these. But because these few elements appeared in such fantastic and varied forms, Astrid never grew tired of seeing them. Her next adventure would involve all of the above.

A Giant Crater Filled with Water 

Thanks for Reading!