Monday, 7 October 2019
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| today's route |
I passed a local road and saw a Great Pyrenees ambling across the road, holding up several cars. It looked pretty funny because of course those dogs are about half the size of today's cars.
I passed an Amish horse-and-buggy on the road.
This area of the state, like others I've passed, is used for crops, including tobacco and corn and soybeans, as far as I could tell - they were mostly all harvested now. Also small herds of cattle and some scattered houses.
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| Bluebird (internet photo) |
I saw a Bluebird. Such a gorgeous blue. When they fly it's hard to miss seeing them. And they always make me understand where the phrase "bluebird of happiness" came from.
A sign at the entrance to Mammoth Cave National Park said it's a World Heritage Site and an International Biosphere Reserve. Important stuff.
It only took me about an hour to get to the parking lot at Mammoth Cave, but I'd left the campground early just in case, so there was plenty of time for me to pick up my ticket and go through the exhibits in the Visitor Center and walk the dogs and feed us all lunch and fix Kongs with peanut butter to keep the dogs happy while I was gone. Turned out well.
Mammoth Cave
I took the tour called Frozen Niagara, advertised as being a fairly easy ¾-mile walk with some of the most spectacular of the cave's scenery. And it was all that, as advertised. But there was almost no place for the guide (aka National Park Ranger) to stand with us all in a group around her - we were on longish passages through parts of the cave - and when she'd stop and talk, I always seemed to be farthest away from her. We had 20 or 25 people in our tour group (our guide said it was nice to have a small group) which was about 10 too many for me to be able to hear what she was saying much of the time.
What that means is that most of what I can tell you I saw in the Visitor Center. Because that helped me understand what I saw in the cave, I'll show that to you first also.
Visitor Center
One of the things they did with their exhibits was say the same things in several different ways, so I've got photos of several signs that say slightly different things about the same topic. Rather than try to explain it myself, I'll let their experts do the talking.
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| the 412' of Mammoth Cave that've been mapped and surveyed |
The exhibits at the Visitor Center weren't presented in an order that makes sense to me, personally, so I'm going to give them to you in the order that does make sense.
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| describes results of tectonic shifts |
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| tectonic plate location 330 million years ago |
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| how limestone formed from marine life |
"Karst" seems to be the natural factor that allows caves to form. The photo on the right shows part of Carlsbad Caverns (in NM), another karst formation.The following photos show more particularly how Mammoth Cave was formed, beginning with slightly acidic water working on limestone, followed by the formation of the sandstone cap that's protected Mammoth Cave where other caves have dissolved and collapsed.
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| that's carbonic acid that's seeping |
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| our tour went in both upper and lower parts |
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| 320 million years ago with mountains rising (see below) |
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| another way to say the same thing |
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| 1st way to say sandstone formed |
Sandstone matters here because the sandstone cap is what's protected the limestone, the foundation of Mammoth Cave, from erosion by the continuing presence of running water.
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| how the running water decorates the caves |
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| how they say the same thing |
Cave Tour
There are more than 170 species of critters that have adapted to live in the cave environment, including several species of crickets, they said.
Right after we entered the cave, the rangers showed us a long, fat, fuzzy, black millipede sitting on a ledge. As it wasn't far from the entrance, I thought it might have figured out how to come and go, though I don't know what it would come into the cave for. I don't know if the rangers explained it because I missed a lot of what they were saying.
They also showed us the entrance to the den of a packrat. We saw all the debris it'd left at the entrance to the burrow; the ranger said it did that so a predator would have to walk across it to get to her; even in the dark it'd be able to hear the predator coming and would have time to run away. Because the packrat can't see in the dark, it leaves a scent trail that it can follow back to the entrance to escape.
The park service has several different entrances they use to go to different parts of the cave. The entrance for our tour was where another longer tour going a different route would finish up, having started somewhere else. Our tour began, of course, in an upper part of the cave, where it's mostly dry and the formations are old. The ranger told us the dry part is typical of most of Mammoth Cave. The stalactites and stalagmites we saw on our part of the tour are unusual in this cave.
These formations are, as you saw above, the results of seeping water. And even in this upper, older part of the cave, we saw some of that. Most of what we saw in the beginning were like boulders - huge rocks and slabs of rock. Though it's interesting to be surrounded by all this rock, I didn't bother with photos because we all see rocks (though much smaller) every day. I did take these photos of stalactites that we saw near the entrance.
Right after we entered the cave, the rangers showed us a long, fat, fuzzy, black millipede sitting on a ledge. As it wasn't far from the entrance, I thought it might have figured out how to come and go, though I don't know what it would come into the cave for. I don't know if the rangers explained it because I missed a lot of what they were saying.
They also showed us the entrance to the den of a packrat. We saw all the debris it'd left at the entrance to the burrow; the ranger said it did that so a predator would have to walk across it to get to her; even in the dark it'd be able to hear the predator coming and would have time to run away. Because the packrat can't see in the dark, it leaves a scent trail that it can follow back to the entrance to escape.
The park service has several different entrances they use to go to different parts of the cave. The entrance for our tour was where another longer tour going a different route would finish up, having started somewhere else. Our tour began, of course, in an upper part of the cave, where it's mostly dry and the formations are old. The ranger told us the dry part is typical of most of Mammoth Cave. The stalactites and stalagmites we saw on our part of the tour are unusual in this cave.
These formations are, as you saw above, the results of seeping water. And even in this upper, older part of the cave, we saw some of that. Most of what we saw in the beginning were like boulders - huge rocks and slabs of rock. Though it's interesting to be surrounded by all this rock, I didn't bother with photos because we all see rocks (though much smaller) every day. I did take these photos of stalactites that we saw near the entrance.
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| looking up - see the cascades? |
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| and another formation |
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| looking down from the photo above |
These photos were taken in the upper part of the cave. Up here, even a short person like me had to bend over to avoid hitting the rocks in the passages, which were pretty narrow in some places.
Still, as you can see, there were places where the rock had eroded away entirely to form chimneys, as in those two photos at left and above.
But though this looks a lot like frozen water, it's stone. One cubic inch of this stuff takes 100-150 million years to grow. So, not an overnight freeze, like the icicles from a house roof.
From here we went down via a ramp and a few stairs into the section named Frozen Niagara. As you'll see, it's quite a tall formation, and I took photos of three altitudes of it.
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| looking up to the top of the Niagara formation, which begins on the left |
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| middle of the formation |
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| lower part of the Niagara formation |
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| another view of the lower part |
As you can tell, there are a series of 96 steps (the ranger told us) that leads down below the hanging formation to another, small room. This part of the cave was definitely more damp than the upper part, and the staircase to me seemed like it'd be slippery. Add that on to 96 steps down and 96 steps back up, plus my dislike of heights (because the cave went below what my photos show) - well, I decided to stay on the plateau at mid-range with the 2nd, less experienced ranger who came with us and a few others on the tour. The people shown in my photos, though, give you an idea of the size of this place.
In all, I wish I'd had several days to spend here and fewer fears to hold me back from learning more about what I was seeing. And I wish the group had been much smaller, or that the 2nd ranger had been more experienced, because I missed so much of what the lead ranger was telling us. I'd recommend this place to anyone other than my mother, whose fear of heights far exceeded my own.
We were taken to and from the cave entrance in a park service bus. When we got back to the Visitor Center, they insisted we all walk across this little platform (below). Whatever that liquid is we walked through is designed to keep us from spreading the fungus that causes White Nose Syndrome, which is killing huge parts of bat populations around the US. Mammoth Cave is home to a large number of bats, and the park service knows that many people take more than one tour in a day, possibly spreading spores from one part of the cave to another.
In all, I wish I'd had several days to spend here and fewer fears to hold me back from learning more about what I was seeing. And I wish the group had been much smaller, or that the 2nd ranger had been more experienced, because I missed so much of what the lead ranger was telling us. I'd recommend this place to anyone other than my mother, whose fear of heights far exceeded my own.
We were taken to and from the cave entrance in a park service bus. When we got back to the Visitor Center, they insisted we all walk across this little platform (below). Whatever that liquid is we walked through is designed to keep us from spreading the fungus that causes White Nose Syndrome, which is killing huge parts of bat populations around the US. Mammoth Cave is home to a large number of bats, and the park service knows that many people take more than one tour in a day, possibly spreading spores from one part of the cave to another.
An interesting conclusion to an interesting trip.
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