![]() ![]() ![]() Though the cave itself was truly massive, it didn’t have the same drippy, psychedelic rock formations I’d seen in Carlsbad Caverns months earlier. Rubble and ruin, I thought to myself, the spoils of war. I walked silently through the colossal passageway, a blown-out mining site wrecked and vacant on my left. Thanks to bats that had inhabited the cave for thousands of years, the dirt floor was once covered in guano, a substance rich in calcium nitrate, making the site ripe for the extraction of saltpeter-one of the primary ingredients used to make black gunpowder, and throughout the War of 1812, a profitable mining operation had sprung up inside Mammoth Cave to keep up with demand. In spite of its lavish opera-house good looks, the room was once used for quite another industry, one that contributed to uncountable deaths. The park was certainly living up to its name. The Rotunda Room is one of the largest in the cave, and as I stared up, slack-jawed, at its enormous domed ceiling, I overheard a ranger whisper that it’s big enough to hold a 737 aircraft. ![]() A weeping waterfall (Photo: Emily Pennington) The occasional amber tinge emitted by the cave’s minimal light fixtures illuminated craggy walls striped with ancient water marks, and a tiny bat slept upside down to my right as I moved through a narrow passageway and felt my knees buckle when I arrived at the next chamber. I was thrilled to indulge my inner emo teenager while visiting a national park for once, embarking on a trip through the world’s longest-known cave system and into the dark bowels of the earth.Ī small, gentle waterfall dripped into the gaping mouth of the cavern as I made my way down the stairs on a self-guided tour of the park’s most famous rooms. Exhausted after spending eight months on the road, my lack of sleep had finally caught up to me and dulled my usually cheerful spirit. The gray Kentucky weather matched my mood perfectly. It was raining when I arrived at Mammoth Cave in late October, a cool downpour making its way through the fading orange leaves of the surrounding deciduous forest. ![]()
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