With more legal paperwork complete and the camper freshly repaired, I turned north to the hills of central Kentucky. The plan was to escape the summer heat and thunderstorms that had come to the South by going underground at Mammoth Cave National Park.
Typical of US National Parks, Mammoth Cave offers really nice tent camping sites which I had used on my previous visit, but no sites for RVs with water and electric hookups. Because of this I opted for a nearby state park, just a few miles North of the National Park boundary. Nolin Lake State Park, near Bee Spring, Kentucky is a small but well-maintained park on the Nolin Lake reservoir. The state park adjoins land controlled by the Corps of Engineers, who are responsible for the dam as well.
In 1963 the Corps build the dam to create Nolin Lake as a reservoir, providing a stable water supply, flood control and recreation for the area. No hydroelectric plant was ever installed to generate power here. It’s a nice little park offering about 30 RV sites with water & electric and one of the nicest dump stations I’ve yet seen. (The longer you camp in a trailer, the more significant such things become to you!)
It turned out that the weather above ground was even nicer than the constant 55 degrees below: sunny & fair with highs in the low 80s and mid 60s nights. As is my custom, I took a day after arrival to relax and check out the immediate area before making a day trip to the National Park.
Years ago Donata & I met my mother at Mammoth and camped in tents. We took a long tour that entered through the historic entrance and included a lunch break at a cafeteria in the Snowball Room within the cave. Today the underground restaurant is no longer in operation and that particular tour route has been retired. I wanted to see another part of the cave anyway, so I opted for the two hour “Domes and Dripstones” tour.
This tour begins at the “new entrance”, a route into the cave established by a promoter named Morrison who was cut from the same bolt as PT Barnum. After convincing the locals that he was looking for oil, Morrison bought some acreage on the cheap where cold air was felt entering a sinkhole. He blasted open the bottom of the sinkhole with dynamite, and dropped his nephew Earl down the hole on a rope, discovering a new entrance into Mammoth Cave. His aggressive promotion, conflict with the owners of the original cave attraction and eventual sale to the government is a fine tale, and you can read more about it here: https://kentuckycavewars.wordpress.com/2014/02/13/george-morrison-and-the-new-entrance-to-mammoth-cave/.
The “D&D” tour (heh) takes two hours and requires the visitor to navigate 500 stair steps. It is listed as “moderate difficulty”, but it tasked me a bit a couple times. I don’t think I would have been able to complete it a hundred pounds ago. One interesting fact is the tour begins with a steep descent from the sinkhole on a 250 step staircase. Morrison’s original wooden stairs from 1922 lasted forty years before finally being declared unsafe. At that time, the US Park Service asked for bids to build a replacement — and had no takers, because the engineering was considered to be impossible given the mandate that the cave could not be damaged by further blasting or excavation.
Finally, a firm that specialized in building stairs for submarines agreed to tackle the job, for the bargain price of $3,000 … per stair step. The Park Service reckoned that three quarters of a million in 1960s dollars was a good deal, and those submarine stairs are still rock solid to this day.
Flash photography is not allowed in the cave and my five year old iPhone camera does a poor job in low light, but here are a few snaps from inside the cave. I’ve employed a bit of digital post where needed, more for clarity than style.
At the end of all cave tours you are required to walk across soapy water mats to control the spread of white nose bat syndrome, a fungus that is wiping out the bat populations of North America. The young woman in front of me held up the line while she attempted to avoid having the “dirty water” get on her feet (she was wearing sandals for a cave tour). I couldn’t help recalling the image of girls of the same age at Banjo-B-Que splashing through the mud and muck barefooted for hours. C’est la vie.
I bought a few postcards at the Visitors Center and headed over to the post office to mail them. On the way was this:
I mailed the cards and bought a cold drink at the Caver’s Camp Store, despite the Japanese intern clerk’s panic over being presented with a two dollar bill. After a full day it was time to return to my campsite, this time via the North entrance to the park. This route takes you across the Green River on the last of three ferries that once operated within the park. The ferry landing is also a popular take-out point for kayaks.
Enough for now. The rest of this Kentucky adventure in the next post.
Happy Trails!
-GF
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