Mammoth Caves Adventure

Our first adventure on our trip to Fort Knox was on Saturday, Nov 21st and involved about an hour drive back to the south on I-65 to visit some caves.

We had some brochures about things to do in Kentucky that hubby had brought home before. My oldest daughter spent a good portion of the drive to KY going through the brochures and letting me know things they really wanted to try to see while we were there.

One item on their list was the Mammoth Cave Wildlife Museum - essentially a 14,000 sf museum with about 1600 different animals, marine life and insects displayed in their natural environment, which is located near several of the caves that make up the Mammoth Cave area.

So we decided that while we were in the area of the museum, we might as well check out a cave, since none of us had ever really been in caves before. The first cave we attempted was closed; our second attempt was Outlaw Cave.

Many of the caves that make up the Mammoth Cave region are actually privately owned - several by generations of the original families that discovered the cave. Some families do a good job of managing and caring for the caves; others do not.

The Outlaw Cave is said to have been a cave where Jesse James would hide out and is still owned by his relatives. The viewing area of this cave is not large and has over the years had some wear and tear - people looking for treasures and artifacts from Jesse James and during the years of what is known as the "Kentucky Cave Wars".

This part of Kentucky covers a county called "Barren" - for good reason. In the early 20th century, tourism to caves was picking up - especially to Mammoth Cave. Local owners of small caves wanted to get in on the tourism dollars and would intentionally mislead tourists into thinking other caves were closed, caved in, quarantined, etc. They would even go so far as to sabotage caves owned by other families in order to drive tourism to their own cave.

The tour guide we had for Outlaw Cave was a PhD archaeologist - she had a ton of knowledge in particular about Native American influence in caves of the region.

After our visit to Outlaw Cave, we took the girls to the Mammoth Cave Wildlife Museum - we were the only people there and the girls took great delight in seeing so many different species of animals on display. There were many species I had never seen except in books; so in all it was an interesting stop.

The girls decided they really wanted to see one more cave, and we had been advised by our first guide that a good one for a nice but not too strenuous observation would be Diamond Caverns. So that was next on our list.

Diamond Caverns was a good visit - there was a group of about 10 of us who took the approximately 40-minute tour with a pretty informative tour guide. It had good lighting and many very interesting formations for the girls to see.

Ways to remember stalactite and stalagmite: Stalactites "hold on tight" to the ceiling. Stalagmites "might grow big enough to touch the ceiling". This seems to have stuck with the girls long past our cave adventures.

Some photos of Diamond Caverns: