Sunday, May 3, 2009

Mammoth Cave National Park: Grand Avenue Tour

Mammoth Cave Natural Entrance
Today Noelle and Eric headed inside Mammoth Cave. We picked a good day for cave exploration too, considering it was a rainy, overcast day outside. We woke up this morning, packed up a wet tent, then headed into Cave City for breakfast at Cracker Barrel. After breakfast we headed back to the park where we picked up our tickets for the Grand Avenue tour. We had some time to kill before our tour so we headed to the Guide's Cemetery and the Natural Entrance for some sightseeing.

The tour itself began with a short bus ride to the Carmichael Entrance. From there we descended down into the dark abyss. The cave passageways were initially large and dry. There were many gypsum flowers covering the walls of many sections of cave.
From these large passageways we headed to the underground lunchroom. It reminded us of our days at Carlsbad. Mammoth Cave's version, however, was much smaller. After a short lunch break we headed deeper into the cave.
The tour led us into some smaller, canyon-like passageways that are called..... The Canyons. From there we walked up, over, down, and under large piles of breakdown before finishing up our tour at Frozen Niagara. It was a good tour and we had a good guide, but Noelle and Eric both agree that a four and a half hour long cave tour is a bit too long.

After our bus returned us to the visitor center, we got into the car and headed out to Floyd Collins' grave.
From there we exited the park, but not before taking our photograph at the entrance sign.
This would most likely be our last visit to Mammoth Cave for a long time.

No comments: