radiopeter

I did it again, and all I can think about is my next descent.

Friday morning my friend Gino and I headed south to Kentucky to visit Mammoth Cave. I’d been planning another cave trip after my visit to Carlsbad earlier this year. Mammoth Cave is just a scant 360ish miles away from Chicago, so a driving trip is perfect.

Again, life changed after being down in the earth.

We arrived and decided to camp. It wasn’t the greatest of ideas because eventually the heavens opened up. After much fussing with a tarp and the rain fly, we were finally safe and dry in our tent and slept. Saturday morning after a hearty breakfast in Cave City (one of the nearest towns) we headed to Mammoth for the first of two tours.

The Grand Avenue tour is a 4.5 hour walking tour in the cave that takes you on a journey of over four miles. It’s serious business for the average person, requiring extensive walking up and down steep inclines in addition to the miles of travel. You aren’t allowed to bring food into the cave, but at the Snowball Room there is a brief lunch stop ($7.50) where we enjoyed a boxed lunch complete with soup, sandwich, fruit, chips, soda, and a cookie.

Mammoth Cave is an entirely different beast than Carlsbad. The gigantic chambers are mind-blowing, and the 367 miles of explored cave make it the largest in the world. The air temperature, always in the mid-50 degrees F, felt much drier than Carlsbad. Much of what the Grand Avenue tour navigates through is cave that isn’t alive. There aren’t many of the fantastic stalactites and stalagmites that you find elsewhere. But what it lacks in ornamentation, it makes up for in sheer unbelievable volume.

Our guide Joel was great. He explained what we were seeing from a geographic standpoint at every turn. Managing a group of 75 people isn’t easy, but he did it with confidence and finesse. There was another ranger, Darlene, who brought up the rear of the tour, but she mostly kept quiet during the trip and needed to duck away from time to time to check various things in the cave.

The real history at Mammoth, explained Joel, was the fact that much of it was explored by black slaves. They were among the first modern humans to visit and explore many sections of the caves. Learning some parts from the white guides, Stephen Bishop, a notable slave, was responsible for pushing beyond most physical limits and exploring sections of the cave no one had ever seen before. He became one of the most successful guides in the cave.

Think about that for a moment. A man who was once sold and traded as goods became the de-facto expert in the caves. The white tourists had to listen to him and do everything he commanded on his tours. They also had to depend on him for their lives. The immensity of that role-reversal boggles my mind. But he did it, and he pushed beyond the limits to find new and unique places in the cave.

Grand Avenue was an amazing tour. If you are in good walking shape, I highly recommend it because it will help clue you in to just how immense Mammoth Cave is. But it was only my warm-up exercise for the Wild Cave tour I had scheduled for the next day. I knew, after walking on many paved paths and after listening to stories about people pushing themselves to find new parts of the cave, that if this four mile stretch was so carefully constructed for tourists, there had to be much more behind the scenes. And indeed there was. But those stories are best saved for another post.

The full photo set from the trip is posted on my SmugMug site.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 19th, 2008 and is filed under blogpost. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.