Mammoth Cave
Interesting facts
- Remains of an ancient shark, Saivodus striatus, comparable in size to a modern great white were identified in the cave's limestone in 2020.
- Several fossil shark species, including Glikmanius careforum and Troglocladodus trimblei, are known only from the roughly 330-million-year-old limestone of Mammoth Cave.
- In 1972 a six-person team finally joined the Flint Ridge system to Mammoth Cave; the decisive squeeze, the Tight Spot, was passed by Patricia Crowther, who weighed just 115 pounds.
- Deep in the newly reached river passage, the explorers spotted the old name Pete H carved into the wall, proof that they had entered known Mammoth Cave territory.
- During the War of 1812 some 70 enslaved workers dug saltpetre from the cave's sediments on an industrial scale to supply gunpowder makers.
- In 1935 guides found Lost John, the preserved body of a pre-Columbian mineral miner crushed by a falling boulder.
- Traces of human activity in the cave go back more than 5,000 years, when Indigenous people mined minerals far underground.
- The first photographs inside the cave were taken in 1866 by the Cincinnati photographer Charles Waldack, who lit the darkness with burning magnesium.
- The Kentucky cave shrimp, a blind, translucent crustacean, lives nowhere in the world except the waters of this cave system.
- An estimated 9 to 12 million bats once roosted in the cave's historic section; today only a few thousand remain at best.
Why it is worth it
The most accurate map of Mammoth Cave for nearly forty years was drawn from memory by a man who wasn't free to leave it. Stephen Bishop was enslaved by the cave's owners and put to work as a guide in his teens; by 1842 he had explored passages no one else had found, crossed a pit he named the Bottomless Pit that earlier guides had considered impassable, and produced a map so detailed that visiting geologists came to consult him directly. He could read and write and had picked up enough Latin and Greek to discuss science with the professors he guided underground.
That same year, the cave's owner, physician John Croghan, tried something else with it: he moved sixteen tuberculosis patients into stone huts built inside the cave, believing the constant cool air and mineral vapors would cure them. It didn't. Five patients died underground, and the rest died shortly after being brought back to the surface; the experiment was abandoned within ten months. The stone hut foundations are still there today — one of the stranger structures inside any show cave in the world.
Scale is the other reason Mammoth Cave keeps its name: more than 680 kilometers of passage have been mapped, making it comfortably the longest known cave system on Earth, and park geologists think there may be another several hundred kilometers still unmapped beneath the same hills.
Good to know
- Over 680 km of mapped passage — the longest known cave system on Earth, with an unknown amount still unsurveyed.
- The 1840s tuberculosis-hospital huts built by enslaved laborers are still standing and appear on some ranger-led tours.
Getting there
37 km from Bowling Green. Louisville Muhammad Ali International Airport (SDF) is about 114 km away.
On these lists
37.18333, -86.10000per Wikidata