After leaving Tennessee our next stop was Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky. So named because they still haven’t mapped it all out and the cave tunnels span miles. If you are a cave person this is the place for you. They offer several tours from the standard to an old-timey lantern lit tour. If you are adventurous there is a tour where you go places accessible only by crawling through tight spots. We chose to do the standard tour. Unfortunately that meant the tour was around 100 people. Luckily we were able to spread out while walking so it didn’t always feel like it was crowded with people as well as tight spaces. There were still some areas where we had to squeeze between the walls and weren’t able to stand upright. I never felt claustrophobic but cave crawling or even a tour with tighter passages is not something I’m eager to experience. The cave system is extensive and there are sections still being explored. Recently, one large area thought to be a separate system was connected when explorers who had entered the other system popped out in a well known part of Mammoth Cave. The part we toured was easily accessible and the most well known. Locals had used these caves for all sorts of things. In the 1800s they used these caves for mining. Around the entrance to the cave were remnants of trees they had bored out and used as pipes (second photo below).
They didn’t have many formations formed from calcite except for one they called the waterfall:
We hiked around aboveground. Many of the paths were closed because of mudslides so we didn’t get to see the sinkhole as hoped but still got to see some wildlife (and a river trolley). There are lots of entrances to the caves all over the place. Our KOA host told us the mist we could see rising up over parts of the land indicated cave entrances, or at least where the caves were close to the surface because the temperature difference caused the mist.
We also hiked around Radnor Lake State Park. We didn’t quite make it around the lake before it rained, but we did see a Red Tailed Hawk eating a meal about 10 feet from the trail. It was not disturbed by the people walking by or talking or taking pictures.
We stayed at a nice KOA where we had our second close encounter with a tornado. Luckily this KOA had a concrete building (shower house) designated as a tornado shelter. Even luckier the storm passed to the north of us (just beyond the hills in the photo below). We watched it with many folks staying at the KOA as well as the owner who was in touch with local family/friends and also had insider weather info. Over the summer we had learned of a youtube weather guy, Ryan Hall Y’all, who does broadcasts before and during extreme weather events. He uses and contributes to a website called WeatherWise which has all kinds of weather tracking ability. We used these sites a LOT this year.
I’ll end with a sampling of the lovely birds and butterflies we saw in Kentucky:
