Mammoth Cave National Park is the biggest disappointment of our trip so far. We’ve been unexpectedly delighted by many of the parks, like Death Valley and Petrified Forest, and even though we expected to be disappointed by Carlsbad Cavern, we were impressed. Maybe Carlsbad is why we expected more of Mammoth Cave, and we thought Mammoth would be managed like Carlsbad. We found that not only is Mammoth not managed like Carlsbad, the cave itself isn’t nearly as impressive.
Mammoth Cave’s claim to fame is that it is the longest cave system in North America, and one of the longest cave systems in the world with over 400 miles of cave mapped to date. That’s interesting, but what you get to see on the standard Historical Tour is about two miles of cave, and it’s not very interesting since the part they let you see is mostly dry, so there aren’t any interesting formations. The history of the cave is interesting, and as you take the tour with approximately 100 tourists, the ranger/tour guides keep pounding on the history and how as one of the sheep meandering through the cave, you are becoming part of history. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that waddling along on this canned tour is not as significant as being a slave risking his life to explore the cave and make a little money taking people who will pay for the adventure of tagging along with the real explorer who mapped the cave with only a lantern for light, but it seemed like the majority of the people on the tour with us were buying it. This tour was everything we were afraid Carlsbad would be, and everything it wasn’t - a disappointment after exploring caves in Belize, with too many people and not much to see.
Mammoth Cave’s claim to fame is that it is the longest cave system in North America, and one of the longest cave systems in the world with over 400 miles of cave mapped to date. That’s interesting, but what you get to see on the standard Historical Tour is about two miles of cave, and it’s not very interesting since the part they let you see is mostly dry, so there aren’t any interesting formations. The history of the cave is interesting, and as you take the tour with approximately 100 tourists, the ranger/tour guides keep pounding on the history and how as one of the sheep meandering through the cave, you are becoming part of history. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that waddling along on this canned tour is not as significant as being a slave risking his life to explore the cave and make a little money taking people who will pay for the adventure of tagging along with the real explorer who mapped the cave with only a lantern for light, but it seemed like the majority of the people on the tour with us were buying it. This tour was everything we were afraid Carlsbad would be, and everything it wasn’t - a disappointment after exploring caves in Belize, with too many people and not much to see.
While the cave itself was a disappointment, the above ground park has lots of accessible hiking trails which allow dogs, and which take you to interesting features like this river which is flowing out of the cave.
This is a sinkhole, which goes into the cave.
We felt like we were in Belize when we rounded a turn and saw this ferry connecting two ends of a park road across a river. Unlike Belize, this ferry had a motor rather than a hand crank.
This is a small part of the line of people on our tour heading into the cave. I didn’t get too many photos from inside the cave because anything I thought might be interesting had somebody’s big head in front of it.
These saltpeter sinks were one of the historical features explained by the rangers. They were used to sift and rinse saltpeter from the ore collected in the cave.
We left Mammoth with our next stop the Gateway Arch National Park in St. Louis. We knew we wouldn’t get all the way there, so we found the Ohio County Park Campground and Fairgrounds along the way, not too far off the highway. They advertised full hookups for $20, so we decided to go and get some laundry done. They had what they advertised, but we also found that on Friday the staff goes home at 3, so some other campers told us to just find a spot and deal with it in the morning. We found a spot, got our laundry done, and went to the office in the morning. The person who takes the money doesn’t work on Saturday, so the people who were there told us that since we hadn’t used any electricity, the site was free! We would have been delighted to have a water and sewer site for $20, but we were even more delighted to have it for free, so we thanked them profusely and headed for St. Louis.
