This year’s National Park adventure was by default close to home. Mammoth Cave National Park is a 4.5 hour drive from the house. Lacking paid vacation this year due to my job change, I decided to take a week despite the hit my finances would take. The past 4 years we have gone on extended pilgrimages to National Parks around this great country and a year off is a year we won’t get back. Mom’s health is good and her spirit for adventure is thriving at 73; but life keeps proving that one can take nothing for granted. What one puts off may be something lost. Too much can happen in a year’s time.
We met our traveling companions at the farm on Monday, July 23, and loaded up Craig’s F150 with our camping gear. We had reserved site 6 on Loop A at Mammoth Cave Campground. The drive to the Park was uneventful and we set up our campsite as the day wound down.
Mammoth Cave Campground is well placed for many park adventures. Within easy walking distance to the campstore, which is housed in a small complex complete with a post office, laundry and shower house, and the Visitor Center it provides an excellent launching spot. The bathrooms are nice and clean, our campsite was roomy with plenty of space for our tents and camp chairs. We used the fire ring nightly to cook dinner and relax around as darkness fell.
We discovered much to our dismay that the more popular cave tours are sold out in advance. We purchased tickets for our whole group to do the short Frozen Niagara tour and we got 2 tickets for the last Historic tour of the day.
Mom went on the popular Frozen Niagara tour which was rated easy for folks with limited physical abilities and or limited desire to spend hours underground. A bus picked us up at a designated shelter to take us over to The Frozen Niagara entrance. The Ranger led tour offered commentary about the cave and its most popular formation including the cave crickets, and the man made entrance to the formation rich area of an otherwise dry cave system. The tour was fairly short. An optional side trip down 49 steps to a small chamber under the Frozen Niagara formation, was part of the short cave adventure.
The second tour we did later in the day was the 2+hour Historic Cave tour that left from the Visitor Center. A short walk down the hill to the Historic Entrance started our tour. I did this tour twice while we were on vacation here. My son and his wife drove up for a night and I got tickets to a couple of tours in advance. Each volunteer or Interpretive Park Ranger gets to choreograph their presentation so one gets to hear about different aspects of the history or geology of this great cave during their tour if they luck out and get different guides which I did.
The Historic Tour consists of a nice loop that takes one by artifacts from the war of 1812 when the cave was mined for saltpeter. When the mining interest became unviable economically tourism began in earnest and exploration became a driver to expand the accessibility and increase the distance for available touring options. We were told about the most famous of the tour guides and explorers and the evolution of the system to its current acknowledged dominance as The Longest Cave System in the World.
This tour is cited as strenuous due to the Fat Man’s Misery and the Tower inside the Mammoth Dome. The number of stair steps makes the tour difficult for folks with physical limitations or respiratory issues. The cave is at a constant 54 degrees year round making it a cool way to spend a couple of hours on a hot muggy July afternoon.
These tours were a good introduction to Mammoth Cave and seem to be reasonably available without advance reservations.
MrsSmithsLifeUnexpected 