We Visited All 63 U.S. National Parks

When visited:            August 2007 and 1970s

When Established:   July, 1941

Park ranking:            45 out of 63

Highlight:                  Amazing cave rooms, Frozen Niagara, World Heritage Site

Why not to go:         If you don’t like caves!

Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky is the largest cave system in the world and home to thousands of years of human history. This combination makes it worthy of being a national park but also a UNESCO World Heritage Site.  Currently the NPS Site lists 11 different cave tours that are available!

I had visited Mammoth Cave in the 1970s with my grandparents and remembered the Frozen Niagara formation and the cave features. We must have taken the Frozen Niagara Tour as they were mobility limited, but as a child I don’t remember the details.

Mammoth Cave in 2007 — I forgot a had that awful mustache — the last national park on our 7 week trip

Our family included Mammoth Cave National Park as our 23rd national park visited on our 7-week cross country trip.  The trip would cover almost 14,000 miles. It was also our last park of that trip as we headed from Kentucky to our home in Elizabethtown, Pa the following day. (Not Elizabethtown, Kentucky)

We stayed the night prior to visiting the national park in Horse Cave, Kentucky. We had travelled from St. Louis and reached Louisville to visit the Louisville Slugger factory and see Churchill Downs. Horse Cave is about 30 minutes to the national park entrance.

We signed up for the “Grand Tour” a 4.5 hour, 4 mile underground tour (Currently called Grand Avenue Tour).  The first mile of the tour was relatively flat and wide and was highlighted by cave gypsum, crystal-like formations that grew into flower-shaped glistening clusters.

Mammoth Cave cave gypsum

The second mile of the tour was a very narrow canyon, that reminded us Maligne Canyon that we had seen a few weeks earlier in Jasper National Park in Canada.  The canyon in the cavern is still being carved out by fast running water.  The tour takes you to the canyon floor and walks along the flowing water.  We clearly were not among the first people there are we saw some historic cave graffiti from the mid-1800s.

Graffiti from the 1800s inside the cavern

We encountered a few sleeping bats and some cave crickets but no other wildlife.  After those sections we were ready for lunch in the cave in the cave’s Snowball Dining Room!

After lunch, we tackled the second half of our tour.  The tour had us traversing uneven landscape – climbing and descending some underground “mountains” – going through three levels of the cave.  We went through the Grand Canyon of the cave and we passed some amazing flow stone features including the Frozen Niagara.  This area is full of stalagmites, stalactites, drapes, columns and soda straws.  The tour felt like we had travelled through three different caves and it showed the diversity of the cave system.

Mammoth Cave is the largest cave system in the world and we saw less than 1% of it on our journey.  Another tour that we said we should do is the Historic Tour which starts in the natural entrance and takes you to the river Styx!

Formations inside the cavern

We thoroughly enjoyed our time in the cave and should consider making future visits.  We didn’t take advantage of the 80 miles of hiking trails outside of the cave system or the kayaking or biking.  There is so much more to do at Mammoth Cave National Park than Wind Cave National Park – but there is one cave system in a national park that our family likes “batter”.  But that’s for a future post!