[Louisville, KY / Mammoth Cave National Park, KY, Mar 21-22, 2024]

After my work trip was over at lunch on Thursday, we drove 4 hours east to Louisville, KY. This put us within 90 minutes of Mammoth Cave, so it was a good place to overnight. We stayed in downtown Louisville, so we walked to dinner. The streets were busy with people hauling musical instruments around the conference center, so we figured some kind of music-related conference was going on.

Our dinner at Porch Kitchen in the Marriott Hotel was delicious! Sadly, we didn’t have time or energy to sightsee properly in Louisville, but at least I got a photo at the edge of Whiskey Row – Louisville and Kentucky as a whole were well-known for their bourbon!

The next morning, we drove the 90 minutes to Mammoth Cave National Park. Even though they are both in Kentucky, Mammoth Cave is on the Central Time Zone, so we gained the hour we lost yesterday when we drove from Champaign to Louisville.

Mammoth Cave was known to Native Americans for thousands of years. They never lived in the cave, but there is evidence they descended in it frequently and mined it for minerals. European settlers discovered the cave in the late 1700s. Formal tours began in the early 1800s and the cave gradually became world famous. In the early 1900s, the Kentucky Cave Wars began. Private land owners lured visitors who were originally headed to Mammoth Cave to caves on their property instead. One such person was George Morrison. He came to Kentucky looking for oil, but when that failed, he joined the Kentucky Cave Wars. He discovered several cave features we would see on our cave tour. He eventually sold his land to the National Park Service in the 1920s. Mammoth Cave National Park would not be established until 1941, however, following contentious eminent domain proceedings. Mammoth Cave is both a UNESCO World Heritage Site and International Biosphere Reserve.

The only way to see the cave is to book a tour in advance at Recreation.gov. Different tours are available on different days of the week but we opted for one of the most popular ones, Domes and Dripstones, at 11 am. We boarded a bus near the visitor center to the cave entrance. which was at one of the sink holes formed by the water.

The sinkhole depression leads to the cave entrance, which, continuing with the sink comparisons, is like a drain. This part was very steep and narrow with stairs guiding the steep descent. There was lots of water dripping around us, enhancing the drain effect.

Second portion was dry and much bigger. The type of rock above us kept this part of the cave from having dripping water. In the past, underground rivers would pass through the cave. Now those rivers are below our feet.

One of the cool things we saw was Crystal Lake. Back before this was a national park, you could get on a boat on the lake! We could see the stairs descending towards it.

The final part of the tour was the Frozen Niagara – a wall of stalactites that look like a frozen waterfall.

We exited from a different place. The bus was waiting for us to take us back to the visitor center.

The entrance to the cave we took on the tour was blasted by George Morrison. There is also a natural entrance, which was walking distance from the visitor center. We wanted to check it out before we left.

We left by early afternoon and headed 4.5 hours away to our next overnight in Memphis, TN. Nashville was on the way so we stopped there for an early dinner. It was fun to see the city again after my first and only visit here in all the way back in 2008. We had a delicious later lunch/early dinner at Hamilton Social. The place was quite busy and the streets of Nashville were also busy with people clearly on bachelor/bachelorette parties! It was a long day though and we promptly hit the hay as soon as we got to our Memphis hotel.