Day 28: Hurricane Mills, TN to Crossville, TN

Stops:

Nashville, TN

Mammoth Caves National Park, KY

For a moment, you might think that the picture below is from Athens, Greece, but you'd be wrong.  It is actually a full scale replica of the Parthenon in Nashville, TN.  It was built for the 1897 Centennial Exposition. Inside you will find a full scale replace statue of the goddess Athena.  The structure also houses the art museum.

A short 2 hour drive from Nashville takes you to central Kentucky, where Mammoth Cave NPis located.

If you have only one day here, take the Historic Tour and the New Entrance tour.  Some of the other tours, which are more hands-on and involve true spelunking, walking to and in underground rivers, and crawling through tiny holes, sometimes less than a foot tall require advanced reservations many months ahead for the summer months. 

The Historic Tour takes you to the Natural Entrance of the cave.  As of 2013, 400 miles of cave have been discovered.  The cave is a work in progress and explorers continue to find new passageways and rooms.  This makes the cave the longest cave system in the world.

When you enter the cave fromte Natural entrance, you will immediately realize why the cave is called what it is.  The rooms are huge and the tunnels are wide--of mammoth proportions.  However, the cave is mostly featureless and lacking of decorations.  This is due to the sandstone and shake cap which makes it impenetrable to water and thus no stalactites and stalagmites.   However, there are a few places where there was no cap and here you will see some of these decorations.

The cave was originally used to mine saltpeter, a common ingredient in gunpowder, by slaves.  Once the wars were done and there was noncore need for saltpeter, the cave owner, needed to find another way to make money and resorted to tourism.

Back then, only the rich and educated could make and afford a trip to see the cave.   They would graffiti their names on the ceiling as a reward for the journey or hire a slave to do it for them. Because the slaves were not allowed to learn how to write, getting hired forced them to learn how to write.

My favorite of the tours is the New Entrance tour as it takes you to a sinkhole that was blasted out and led to the pretty decorations.  The entrance into the New Entrances requires going down many steep shafts via steep stairs and in very narrow spaces. Very exciting. 

My favorite part of the Historic tour is called Fat Man's Misery. Once the spot where a river ran through, the bottom part of the river ran faster carving a narrow slit into the rock, leaving the top part wider but not so tall and less than a foot width at the bottom.

Mammoth Caves also is trying to combat White Nose Syndrome.  Every participant on every tour must walk across a biomat at the end of the tour. WNS has a 90 to 100% fatality rate for bats, so it is a very serious issue, no exceptions.

Onward to our overnight destination ar the Crossville, TN Wal-Mart.