A Mammoth Adventure

My brother C came in town and we took the opportunity to go to Mammoth Cave. I figured having 3 adults for 3 kids was a pretty good ratio, perhaps the best we were going to get. So we went down early-ish last Saturday. We forgot about the time change (it's just barely into the next time zone, and only that because the time zone slashes diagonally across the state of Kentucky), but it gave us time to eat some lunch when we got there.

We had only bought tickets for 1 tour because we wanted to also do the self-tour, and you can't get self-tour tickets on-line or in advance. So we changed our day around a little so we could do the self-tour first. In the future there are a few things I will DEFINITELY do when I go to Mammoth:

#1- Do the self-guided tour second.

#2- NEVER EVER GO TO MAMMOTH DURING PEAK SEASON!

We missed peak season by a few weeks. Not on purpose, mind you, it just happened that way. But in the future it WILL be on purpose. The lines were almost non-existent. It was lovely.

Anyways. We had a little down time while we were deciding on tours, etc. Rob took this picture of the group of us looking really bored. It's a plus and negative for Mammoth, really. You can do a lot of things, and there's as much down time as you want, but figuring out exactly how much down time to plan and how to do it, that's harder. ... Note the older couple sitting next to us. They were super nice and were trying to get Elijah to talk to them. He scowled at them. It was funny. While Miciah will talk to everyone (if you have a pulse, she will talk to you until you're BFF), Elijah will talk to almost no one. It's funny.


Down into the Historic Entrance of the cave. It's awesome! You can feel the cold air from a fourth of a mile away, maybe more. Then as you're walking down into the cave, it's blasting cold air at you. Let me tell you, 53 degrees F feels REALLY NICE in August (even though this has actually been a really pleasant August)! And the entrance is huge. Just huge.

We saw a bat on our way in. Have to take a picture of a bat when you're in a cave, right! Incidentally, the nice older couple from our wait? They're the ones who told us where the bat was. So you CAN benefit from talking to strangers.

We saw people walk into the cave wearing shorts and T-shirts. Don't do that. 53 degrees is colder than you think. Especially when you're in there for a few hours. For instance, one of the rangers we saw inside the cave was wearing a coat and gloves.

Caves are dark. C took this picture before remembering that my camera has a flash. I liked this picture anyways. Kind of hauting. It's me in the middle (the sort-of image blur you almost see) and Miciah on the side.

The first "room" you come to once you're a good ways inside the cave is the Rotunda. Wow. It's amazingly huge. I remember as a kid looking up at that ceiling and thinking, "It's going to crash down on me, I just know it!" It was hard, even as an adult, to NOT think that. :) Really, anyone who goes inside a cave is an idiot. But they're so cool! How can you resist the beauty, scope, and history of a place like Mammoth Cave? You can't. So you become okay with being an idiot and you walk inside the cave.

Inside the Rotunda is lots of history. During the War of 1812 they mined saltpetre for gun powder. Two cool things about that: 1- saltpetre is bat poop. 2- They made these long pipes out of WOOD. All the way from the Rotunda to the mouth of the cave (and possibly up the hill, too? I dunno about that part). Wicked cool. The pipes are still in tact for part of it.

Part of the history of Mammoth Cave is from thousands of years ago. Native Americans came inside the cave, took gypsum from the walls, left artifacts, and at least one even died in the cave. One of the artifacts left behind was a pair of shoes or slippers. They had a pair on display--they were remarkably well-preserved, we thought, so we asked about them. The original pair had been on display in a glass display box. The box was broken and the slippers stolen some time in the 80's. I asked the ranger if they had another pair. Nope. And that's sadness.

This picture is a near-repeat from the picture above it, but I included it so you can see a little bit of the scope I'm talking about. You can just make out the ceiling and far wall. And this isn't the Rotunda. It's just a passageway.

The self-tour isn't long. Like 3/4 mile. Enough for you to want to go further and see more. I liked this picture. The sign says, "Do Not Enter", so of course that's the place my kids wanted to go.

After the self-tour we had to walk all the way back up the huge hill. I remember that hill from when I was a kid. I hated it! :) But it wasn't so bad this time because I was accompaning Teancom who insisted on walking by himself. He didn't just walk by himself, but by himself on the curb. The itty-bitty curb. It was a leisurely walk. ... Any other kid who was walking down the hill on the curb got yelled at by a cute little 2-year-old boy who thought he owned that space. To one kid Teancom said, "Hey! You're in trouble!"

The next tour was the New Entrance Tour, which was previously called the Frozen Niagra Tour. This is one of the COOLEST tours to do because it has pretty darn neat formations in it. Most of Mammoth Cave is cool because it's so, well, mammoth. But it doesn't have many formations. This part of the cave does. It's intimidating, though, starting the tour. You start by going down 250 feet on these wicked-cool stairs. Here's a picture of me on part of the stairs.

These stairs, honestly, are a little scary. You weave through the cave's 14 vertical shafts. There are drop-offs. You can hit your head at almost every turn. Miciah, who was very brave, kept saying, "I can't believe I'm doing this." Some interesting history of the stairs: They took 20 years to build. Usually in caves, she said, you blast the cave to fit the stairs. They didn't want to do that, so it took them a long, long time to build. I would NOT have wanted to be a part of that project. There are 280 stairs and they cost $3,000 PER STAIR--that's $840,000 total (and they were built between 1960 and 1980, so imagine that number with inflation).

It takes quite a while to get down the stairs, so we had some down time waiting for the rest of the group. So we got to take some pictures. Miciah took pictures of rocks. I didn't include those pictures on this blog, sadly. Another sad thing: cave pictures don't turn out well. Bummer, too, cause caves are freakin' awesome! I liked this picture, though:

Miciah and C as we waited. Notice his sweatshirt. He came from Utah and totally forgot to bring a sweatshirt for the cave. So he got to be a Thacker for the day. :) ... The first picture I took, C looked like he was on drugs. To that comment he said, "I am on drugs." I said, "Oh. Well then it turned out perfect." And then I took another picture.

We should have done this tour first if we expected to have decently behaved children. :) But it was not to be. The kids weren't horrid, but they could have been a lot better. It struck me as they all melted down in their own way that if C hadn't been with us, we would have been toast. Elijah started going crazy. I chastized him for it finally and he did his Elijah withdraw thing. Normally there's time to deal with that sort of thing, but not when you're in a cave tour with 113 other people. So Rob took Elijah and I took Teancom, who he'd been carrying.
We went from happy children, like Teancom on Rob's shoulders (picture taken during the self-tour), to children like this:

I love Rob's expression in that picture. Priceless. Honest. By the last half hour of the tour Teancom was asleep in my arms, Elijah was exhausted, and Miciah was uber-whiny. C's job was to carry the camera when I didn't have it. My camera is my other baby. And let me tell you, it's SO NICE to have pictures of me with my family, and pictures of me at angles I've almost never seen before. So THANK YOU, C!

The best part of the New Entrance Tour is Frozen Niagra and the curtain room, I think they call it. We didn't get any decent pictures of it (cause NO ONE does except the professionals), sorry. I didn't go down to see it, though, because Rob and I went to Mammoth two years back, and C hadn't been for years and years. So I held Teancom and didn't walk down the 50 stairs (that's 100 total. With a sleeping baby. No thanks). And that is what Miciah cried about the whole time: I want my mommy! You just can't win.

People passed me holding my sleeping toddler. Most of them chuckled or smiled. One woman, a grandmother going through with her pre-teen granddaughters, said, "Are your arms cramped yet?" I told her they weren't. She said, "I remember those days. I remember my arms cramping! It hurt!" My arms didn't hurt then. They didn't hurt for the rest of the day. And then the NEXT day: Wham! I could hardly use my right arm! :) Good times.

On the way out of the cave we saw these 2 cave crickets. They looked more like spiders, really, with these long spindly legs. ... I like this picture because you have to orient yourself a little. Those crickets are on the ceiling.

So even though we did the tours in the wrong order, it was way fun and totally worth it. I have a love for Mammoth Cave that would be inexplicable if so many other people didn't have it. :) It's just a cave you fall in love with, I think. Well, at least I fall in love with it again every time I go.