Eric & me in front
of the Mammoth
Cave National
Park Visitor Center.
Mammoth Cave is 405 miles long... It's the longest cave in the world.
We bought souvenirs &
Post Cards at the
Park Store.
Tickets for the Historic
Cave Tour are $7.00
each.
There are seven other tours in the 41 miles of cave that have been developed for visitors.
We take our time on the
inclined trail to
the cave.
Steps led down into
Mammoth Cave.
Water drips down into
the entrance.
Mammoth Cave is the result of over three hundred million years of accumulated sediments millions of pounds of pressure and geologic shifts. The current day Green River continues to cut into the rock to in south central Kentucky.
This section of the cave
is called Twilight.
The temperature in Mammoth Cave is in 54 degrees. It has never been lived in for extended periods of time like Seminole Canyon.
This is The Rotunda.
It's one of the largest
rooms in the cave.
This section of Mammoth Cave is "dry." There are no streams and no dripping water. No stalagmites and no stalactites, like in Carlsbad Caverns.
Woven Slippers
are not naturally found
in Mammoth Cave.
Partially burned Reed Torches
were used for lighting.
Rediscovered by settlers in the 1790s, Nitre (the naturally occurring form of Saltpeter) was mined in Mammoth Cave during the War of 1812.
The Bransford Family guided visitors through the upper section of the cave from 1838 to 1939. Mammoth Cave and the lands above were dedicated as a National Park in 1941.
This rock is called the
Sundial.
We are touring the cave at 10:00 am. The Sundial is reading 1:00 pm. Maybe it's off....
Sandstone keeps water
from seeping into this
section of Mammoth
Cave.
The Ravrnesque Room
Christmas Carols are sung here every December. I imagine voices reverberating throughout the room.
Lighting shows off rock
formations...
This World War I Monument
was dedicated in the 1920s &
rededicated in August, 2017.
We return to Twilight...
... & walk uphill toward
daylight as our tour ends.
No comments:
Post a Comment