I relaxed for the rest of Monday afternoon before
heading back to the natural entrance in the evening for the Star Chamber tour which is lit
only by lantern light. About half of this tour follows the same route as the
Historic Tour but being lit by candlelight made it a completely different
experience. Also, the tour is limited to 40 people so we got to stop a lot more
and listen to our great guide tell stories and point out features that I
hadn’t noticed on the earlier tour. The focus of this tour was on the adventures
of guides and visitors from the 1800s. People would come into the cave for church
services, weddings, and even to live here. A doctor built huts for tuberculosis
patients to come be cured but obviously, life in a cold, damp cave filled with
smoke from fires does not cure a respiratory disease so the experiment was shut
down within a year. The sad part is that tours continued during this time and
no one knows how many visitors left the cave with tuberculosis.  |
| It's a witch! |
The tour ends in the Star Chamber where the guides confiscate your lanterns and let you sit and experience total darkness. As they slowly bring the lights back out, you catch glimpses of crystal specks in the ceiling, making it seem like a night sky filled with stars. On the way back out, we got to go into Gothic Avenue which is filled with names of visitors who candle smoked them on the rock. After that practice was outlawed they starting building rock monuments, many of which are still standing.
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| Gothic Avenue |
The next morning I did some of the front country
trails in the park including Cedar Sink, Turnhole Bend and Sloan’s Crossing Pond. It was
nice to explore above ground and see how the geology of the area contributes to
the caves.
My last tour was in the afternoon and it was another lantern tour.
The Violet City Lantern Tour was the longest tour I did at 3 hours. It begins
again at the natural entrance but proceeds into a part of the cave that is only
accessible on this tour such as Chief City- the largest single room in the cave
system. In some parts we were able to walk on the old tour route which was just
flat rocks but they were pretty unsteady and made quite the racket. Near the
end of the tour we were told the story of Lost John, an aboriginal man that was
discovered by an explorer. Lost John was still intact even though he was over
2,000 years old! The tour dumped us out to a waiting bus where we were driven
back to the hotel. I loved this tour because again, the guide was great and the small number of people we had were really engaged and asked great questions.
Mammoth Cave is the longest cave system known in the world with more than 400 miles of surveyed passageways and untold miles yet explored. Of all 4 tours I did at Mammoth, I preferred the two lantern tours as they were much more intimate. The only drawback is that you can only see as far as the lantern light goes so you don’t really get to peer into the depths and heights surrounding you. I'm glad I combined the lantern tours with the lit tours to see the caves in a different light (pun intended). Its hard to imagine that back in the day tours would last 16-20 hours because people would explore many miles into the cave and then have to make their way back out again with only oil lanterns to guide them. Along the Violet City route, we even passed by old reeds that the Native Americans had used to light their way into the cave.
Although the caves are the main attraction, I took the time to hike a lot of the trails in the area and on every hike I never saw another person. It seems the tourists head straight for the caves and while they are awe-inspiring to experience, I feel that you can't really understand Mammoth without exploring above ground as well.
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