The Very Coolest Caving Experience You're Likely to Have Unless You Own a Cavern
Written: Jul 20 '01 (Updated Jul 23 '01)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: The Wild Cave Tour is one of the most enjoyable experiences available to cave lovers.
Cons: Some people expect cave lovers to know the names of different kinds of rock.
The Bottom Line: The Wild Cave Tour was quite simply one of the most enjoyable and educational experiences of my life.
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| Sloucho's Full Review: Mammoth Cave National Park |
Part 1: A Geologically Paced Introduction
(Those interested strictly in the Wild Cave Tour should skip to part 2)
Because I was extremely lucky on a multiple choice final exam in a geology course that I took as a college freshman, I was given the opportunity to teach geology labs as a senior. I liked the gig so much that I made being a senior last three semesters, but one shouldn't imagine that I understood the first thing about geology.
Each table in the laboratory was equipped with the following: 2 (two) manuals; 1 (one) small box containing twenty-five mineral samples; 1 (one) large box containing forty rock samples; 1 (one) microscope; and 2 (two) lab kits.
My students often approached me with gifts and honeyed words, saying, "O great teacher, would you be so kind as to explain how we are to tell the minerals from the rocks, for this appears to us a great mystery."
"Yea," I answered them, "and forsooth, it did come to me in a dream that the way of discriminating between the minerals and the rocks is, verily, to remember that the minerals all come from the smaller box, whereas the rocks do lurk in the larger."
And so it was that the students completed their lab assignments and were adjourned to frolic in the fields. And there was great rejoicing.
As you can see, I am no stranger to rocks. I believe my first encounters with rocks predate even my earliest memories. The first stitches I ever got came when I split my head on a rock. Between these events and my own distinguished record as an inspired (and inspiring) geology lab instructor, it should come as no surprise that I feel eminently qualified to participate in the "Rock Off Write Off" cosponsored by the charming hypotenuse and the gracious scmrak. You could do much better than the review you're reading now by visiting the homepage for the write off at http://66.55.4.162/rock-off/. But if you care to tough things out here, please consider, for a moment, the list of contributors to this write off: christoff, emptywishes, eplovejoy, fez_monkey, grouch, hypotenuse, jarno_m_l, jkkelley, joubert, mangiotto, prfstars, purplewiz, scmrak, sleestakk, sordid-1, sumo_rhino, sundogg99, teddiec, wiseokc.
Although the roster of contributors includes many who have been paid for their geological expertise, it also includes many who can most charitably be termed geologically impaired. I am perhaps the only contributor who can claim to belong to both groups. Even though I had to administer and grade tests concerning geology, I couldn't tell the difference between gabbro and basalt if my life depended on it. The principle of original horizontality sounds sensible to me, but you'd be surprised to learn how much sounds sensible to me as long as it's typed up in an official-looking textbook with all sorts of fancy diagrams.
I am a man who knows nothing about rocks and nothing worth mentioning about geology. But I know what I like, and I like caves. How it is that 'tree hugger' has more positive connotations than 'troglodyte' is beyond me. If we ever really were cavepeople, I have to confess I'm a little mystified as to why we came out of the caves in the first place. What were we looking for?
More caves, maybe.
Part 2: Why the Wild Cave Tour at Kentucky's Mammoth Cave is one of the coolest experiences available to anyone who has ever wanted to explore caves without getting lost and wasting away in lonesome darkness!
"I love caves. I like them even better than mountains because there are no spiders."
--my tour guide
Although the cave system of Kentucky's Mammoth Cave is the largest in the world (over 300 miles of caverns have been mapped), it is not the most impressive. I can't say what is the most impressive cave system because I haven't visited them all, but I will say that the cavern formations in Mammoth Cave are not, as a rule, as majestic or breathtaking as those in New Mexico's Carlsbad Caverns.
So if you're a person who thinks that the whole point of visiting caves is to peer at nature's intricate limestone handiwork as it registers itself on stalactites and stalagmites, then Mammoth Cave may come as something of a disappointment if you've actually been to Carlsbad.
Carlsbad is magical despite the light bulbs and the stairs and the metal grids and the crowds and, most obnoxiously, the rangers every few hundred meters or so. In my many visits to Carlsbad, I always hated the fact that I could not stray from the pathway, that I was always under surveillance, that I could not throw any loose rocks into any of the brilliant pools in order to hear the gentle plunk reverberate through a series of cavern chambers. I wanted to get away from the crowds. I wanted to be able to pretend, at least for a few minutes, that the cave belonged to me. And you can't do that in Carlsbad.
In fact, I had resigned myself to cave exploration that consisted of walking through electrically lit, government-funded caves with broad, flat, uneventful pathways replete with guardrails that pretend to protect visitors from the cave when they're really designed to protect the cave from the visitors. When I heard about the Wild Cave Tour at Mammoth Cave, I thought it sounded too good to be true.
"They actually let you bump up against the cave walls?" I asked, astonished. "They give you one of those miner helmets with the light, and you actually need it?" I asked, incredulous. "They let you slither through cracks and climb up crevices?" I asked, giddy.
"Yes!" I was assured. "Yes! Yes!"
I first heard about the Wild Cave Tour in June of 1993. By July, I had made arrangements to spend Thanksgiving of that year in Kentucky strictly for the purpose of going on the Wild Cave Tour with a friend from grad school. It's very rare for anything I've anticipated for a substantial time to surpass my expectations, but after anticipating the Wild Cave Tour for almost half a year, my expectations still came up desperately short of the mark.
We got to the cave around 9:45, almost lost our reservations because we were only fifteen minutes early whereas we were supposed to be thirty minutes early, spent about twenty minutes adjusting our hard hats and putting on our knee pads, and then took the bus to the cave. Our tour started around 10:30, and it was quite simply one of the most enjoyable and educational experiences of my life.
Just so that I don't mislead anyone with my excitement, the cave trip was not exciting because it was dangerous. There was never anything akin to danger. We all had lights on our heads and a guide to tell us what rocks to grab with which hand and where not to step, etc. We weren't asked to do anything treacherous or even genuinely challenging. But we did get a chance to get to know a cave without catwalks or lighting fixtures or elevators anywhere in sight.
Being slender and flexible is definitely useful for getting through some of the tight spots, but the guide was always happy to provide an alternate route for those who were struggling in my group (some of whom opted to leave the Wild Cave Tour halfway through, as it was far more demanding than they had anticipated). If you're easily winded or more than a little heavy set or claustrophobic, the Wild Cave Tour might not be the best experience for you, but you have nothing to lose by giving it a whirl. If caves are at all interesting to you, this tour is probably the perfect compromise between safety (you really don't know how to map a cave system, do you?) and fun (the guides can tell what your group is capable of and will take you on particularly challenging routes if you seem to be an adept bunch).
The only vaguely amusing anecdote I have involves me as the butt of the joke. Our group was going through a formation called the 'shotgun,' which was broken into two tunnels, an 'upper barrel' and a 'lower barrel.' Half of the group went through the upper barrel, and half of us, the less fortunate ones, went through the lower. Whenever you're given a choice between an upper and lower tunnel in a cave, remember that water always seeks the lowest level.
A stream ran through most of the lower level, so if you wanted to stay dry, you had to elevate yourself above the water by pressing your knees and elbows against the sides of the cave. I was doing my best to stay high and dry when the person just above me in the upper barrel started to slip back down toward the person behind him in that tunnel. "Brace me," he yelled, just as the tour guide had instructed all of us to yell when we slipped back towards the people behind us. Because subterranean acoustics are a little tricky, the woman behind me assumed that I had called for a brace. And she did what she had been instructed to do by the ranger: She grabbed my feet and pushed me forward, plunging me into the stream that I had been trying to avoid.
I suppose one has to expect to get a little muddy when one goes spelunking.
Recommended:
Yes
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Sloucho
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Member: Mike Davis
Location: Philadelphia
Reviews written: 199
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Read my reviews in order to heal the sick and control the weather. Seriously.
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