Luray Caverns — cave
m01229 from USA · CC BY 2.0

Luray Caverns

  • 2 min read
  • 38.664° N 78.484° W

Interesting facts

  • Dream Lake is only about 50 cm deep at its deepest point, yet its mirrored stalactites make it look like a deep chasm.
  • Northcott's sanatorium drew cave air up a shaft 1.5 metres wide with a large electric fan, replacing all the air in the house roughly every four minutes.
  • Fragments of a skeleton, thought to be a Native American girl, were found fused into calcite and judged no more than about 500 years old.
  • The first column the discoverers saw by candlelight in 1878 was named the Washington Column, after the first US president.
  • The cave is still growing: new calcite builds up at roughly one cubic inch every 120 years.
  • Colours in the formations come from impurities: reds and yellows from iron, black from manganese dioxide, and blues and greens from copper.
  • The Smithsonian sent nine scientists to study the newly found cave, and the next Encyclopaedia Britannica gave it an unusually long article of a page and a half.
  • Arctic explorer Jerome J. Collins delayed his departure on an ill-fated North Pole expedition so he could see the caverns first.
  • Flowstone draperies throughout the cave ring like bells when struck hard with the hand.
  • The Double Column is made of two fluted white pillars side by side, the taller about 18 metres high.

Why it is worth it

Luray Caverns lie beneath Cave Hill on the western edge of the town of Luray, in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, just west of the Blue Ridge. They draw about half a million visitors a year, and their reputation was made almost from the start: a Smithsonian team that examined the cave in 1880 reported that probably no other cave in the world was more completely and profusely decorated with stalactites and stalagmites.

The cave was found on 13 August 1878 by five local men, among them the tinsmith Andrew Campbell and the photographer Benton Stebbins, who had noticed cool air rising from a sinkhole. After about four hours of digging, the two smallest of them squeezed through and lowered themselves on a rope to explore by candlelight. The discoverers tried to buy the land at a court auction while keeping the cave secret, and the Supreme Court of Virginia annulled the sale in 1881. Since 1905 the caverns have been owned by the Luray Caverns Corporation, founded by Colonel Theodore Clay Northcott, whose descendants, the Graves family, still run them. In 1901 Northcott pumped cave air into a sanatorium on the hill above, billing it as the first air-conditioned house in the United States. The caverns were designated a National Natural Landmark in 1974.

The cave developed in Lower Ordovician dolomite and its galleries lie on several levels, with some 260 feet (about 80 metres) between the highest and lowest. A guided walk of about 1.5 miles (2.4 km), lasting 45 minutes to an hour, passes Dream Lake, one of the cave's mirror-still pools, the flowstone drapery of Saracen's Tent, and columns more than 10 metres high. The unique feature is the Great Stalacpipe Organ, devised by Leland W. Sprinkle and in use since 1956: rubber mallets triggered from a keyboard strike 37 stalactites across about 3.5 acres of the cavern, and Guinness World Records lists it as the world's largest musical instrument. The air stays at about 12°C (54°F) year-round.

Getting there

The caverns are on the western side of Luray, about 38 km from Front Royal; US 211 and US 340 meet in Luray, and the Thornton Gap entrance to Skyline Drive in Shenandoah National Park is nearby. The nearest airport is Charlottesville Albemarle Airport (CHO), about 58 km away; Washington Dulles International Airport (IAD), about 95 km away, offers far more flights. A car is the practical way to get there.

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in the United States 228The Most Beautiful Caves in the United States 5The Most Beautiful Natural Wonders in the United States 68The Most Beautiful Caves 86The Most Beautiful Natural Wonders 580

From the encyclopaedia

Luray Caverns, previously Luray Cave, is a cave just west of Luray, Virginia, United States, which has drawn many visitors since its discovery in 1878. The cavern system is adorned with speleothems such as columns, stalactites, stalagmites, flowstone, and mirrored pools. The caverns host the Great Stalacpipe Organ, a lithophone made from solenoid-fired strikers that tap stalactites of varied sizes to produce tones similar to those of xylophones, tuning forks, or bells.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

38.66430, -78.48380per Wikidata