Leslie and David's Wanderings: 28 June 2020 Mammoth Cave National Park

We started our day with Mexican Food Sunday! There is a fairly good Mexican restaurant very close to the RV Park. To be honest, it was our second choice after we found the line a Cracker Barrel was 45 minutes to get a table.

We were happy to find the Mammoth Cave NP Visitor Center was open when we arrived. We had tickets for the 12:30 self tour for the Extended Historic Tour. Leslie was happy to find post cards and David was able to buy his NP hat and coffee mug. None of the guided tours to the lower caves were being offered yet. After getting our safety and history briefing from the ranger, we were cleared to go into the cave. It was raining fairly hard as we trekked to the historic entrance to the cave. There are over 412 miles of cave passages mapped so far, making Mammoth the longest cave in the world. Even as we began our tour, there was a mapping team deep in the cave adding more miles to that number. The three miles we were allowed to tour was the huge upper cave passages. The caves in this area are carved by underground rivers. Limestone is the primary rock in this area from an inland sea 80 million years ago. In places, there is a sandstone cap. Compared to the recent caves we have been in, these caves were massive and open. Native Indians originally explored the caves 4000 years ago. The remains of their reed torches and tools were found up to two miles into the cave. In the early 1800s, bat guano was mined to support the production of gun powder. The extensive mining works are still visible in our tour. In another area, a company tried to start a mushroom growing farm. But companies that were running tourists through the cave sabotaged it, possibly. In yet another area, in 1842, they brought 30 tuberculosis patients into the cave and set up huts to see if the cool/moist air would help their condition. But they had to run fires 24 hours a day to provide light and for cooking. The smoke built up in the cave and worsened their condition and half of them died in the cave. The rocks in the cave are still discolored from the smoke. What we did not see was the usual cave formations (Flow Stone, Stalactites, Stalagmites, etc) that we have seen in all our other cave tours. That is because these caves are formed by underground rivers instead of dissolved minerals. Mammoth cave became a National Park in 1929 but was not opened to the public until 1941.