Climbing 30 flights...
Tuesday, April 09th. Horse Cave, Kentucky.
We actually had to set an alarm this morning to ensure we were up and out in time to make it to the caves for our reservation. The alarm went off and Lorraine said “Hit Sleep, Hit Sleep”.
“It’s on the kitchen counter”, I said, “I’ll get it”. But by then the dogs were fully motivated and ready for their walk. And a great walk it was as the rain and gloom of the last 4 days had gone completely. It was already 20C at 7:30 and the sun had just cleared the hills, piercing a light mist that hung softly over the valley in front of me; Robins were all around chirping their territorial spring songs. It was going to be a damned fine day for spelunking.
We took our time enjoying the first coffee — wasting the time that maybe I could have used snoozing if I’d ever reached the phone without rousing the dogs. The second coffee went with me to the shower room but I stopped on the way to look out on the other side of the ridge that the KOA sits upon; A verdant farmers field stretched across a second valley with the lightest remnant of mist against the pastel morning colours of spring in the forest beyond. I could have stood there all day — but we had reservations at the Mammoth Caves about 25 minutes driving to the southwest and needed to be their 30 minutes in advanceLorraine breakfasted while I showered and then I wolfed down a yoghurt ( and a third coffee — don’t tell Lorraine; I’m only allowed two.) and it was time to move fast. The instructions were a little misleading and we ended up on the wrong road to Lorraine’s dismay — she’s getting tired of navigating — but it was ok as the wrong road re-converged on the right road as I expected it might so all was good. As we pulled up in front of the Visitor Centre something funny happened with the truck that made me think we had a flat tire — something felt like it was rubbing and turning the steering wheel provided resistance. I had no time to investigate beyond a circle walk around the truck as our tour was starting in 35 minutes and I still had to pick up tickets for the 10am “Historic Tour”. The guide bills it as moderate effort with about 400 steps — more or less following in the footsteps of tours since 1816. They also point out that people with phobias, heart conditions and bad knees and any other medical conditions should consider alternatives. I’d been on this tour as a kid ( at least to the best of my recollection) so I felt I’d be ok — but I am frequently anxious about heights and enclosed spaces.
Our tour group included about 40 high schools students all giggly and fidgety and given to awkward inappropriate laughter at the tour guide. He was well experienced with student groups and shut them down pretty well — prompting the escorts and teachers to step up their game. The guides have an interesting approach to keep the groups together, the guide walks slowly at the front followed by the slower members of the party; this included the old-farts like Lorraine and I. This left us time with the guide up front and kept the pimpled crowd well to our rear.
The day had turned hot by the time we reached the entrance; not as hot as when my family was here in ‘71 or ‘72 — that day was well over 90F with a very high humidity. The Cave is mercifully cool, probably about 12C at this time of year so it felt good at first, then cool and then comfortable once we exerted a little effort. It was the same entrance we had used way back then — I can imagine that this must have been a nightmare for my parents. Johnny, my youngest brother, would have been almost 5 if we had gone in 1972 and I can’t imagine taking a five year old on this tour. It was interesting that at first the caverns were taller than I remembered as a kid then later seemed shorter as the ceiling closed down hand the passage narrowed. I also absorbed more of the interpretive discussion on the saltpetre workings near the entrance.
The next portion of the cave made me realize that in those days I was also a lot shorter, and a lot smaller. This is the portion of the tour that passes over the bottomless chasm ( they’ve improved the bridge) and through fat-man’s misery and tall-man’s agony... I passed through those easily in those days but would not have been able to see out of the groove that is fat-man’s and would have been a little claustrophobic today except that only the bottom 4 feet of pass are tight from a girth perspective. The tall-man’s agony was trickier as it required me to walk in a narrow gap bent over almost at the waist for quite a ways while navigating tight turns. Not nearly as difficult as the name suggests but still a really interesting walk. After that, the tour varies from what I remember, instead of a very large cavern ( almost a ballroom) we went up a 10 story stair case through one of the “towers” to return to near the surface. I counted the steps 118, twisting and turning, with a few narrow passages and a few spectacular interior views up and down over 100 feet. I was really impressed that Lorraine and I both made the stairs quite easily. But by the time we regained the entrance Lorraine was struggling with the arthritis in her hip and fairly fatigued.
Returning up the stairs from the cave entrance and into the sunlight was lovely but the day had warmed and this reminded you instantly that the effort to climb out of the cave was pretty strenuous and we still had the hill to climb back to the visitor’s centre. Lorraine rested a bit on the hill and questioned the sanity of a second tour the same day.
“I really think we would have been all right with just the one tour” she said.
“Well, hopefully, a little bit of lunch and a rest will get you ready. But if you don’t feel up to it we can cancel.”
In the back of my mind I was also worrying about the truck — would I be better spending the afternoon looking for the local Ford dealer? I didn’t articulate this as I really didn’t want to give Lorraine anything else to worry about. After her rest she felt good enough to at least consider it. “All right, Lunch may help. But I really want to review what the tour guide says about this next tour before I commit to anything”.
The Hotel is right next to the top of the hill from the entrance; It dates to the early part of the last Century, about 1925, and was clearly given a bad facelift probably about the time my family was here. We opted for the restaurant with the license and table-service and started with a big glass of water and a glass of Sauvignon-Blanc and took our time with the menu. The menu was somewhat limited but the prices weren’t too bad. There was a great looking Hamburger with Mushrooms, ham and fried-egg that I thought the better of and opted for a cat-fish Po’Boy — not sick of those yet. Lorraine had a pulled-pork sandwich. The pulled pork was a little strange tasting and a tad dry — it needed more BBQ sauce and less of it’s somewhat odd wood smoke. The fries that came with it were good. The Po’boy was serviceable — not really breaded and just pan-fried so a little drier and not that airy-crispness of the sandwiches I’d had further south; probably the worst of the fish Po’boy’s I had on the trip and very likely the last.
Lunch did help Lorraine recover and the description of the next tour “Domes and Drips” seemed not to threatening and a little intriguing — there were 500 steps but the first 280 steps were all descending but the distance was only 3/4 of a mile — not too extreme. There was also a 4 mile bus ride that took time off the beginning and the end where you’d be seated in a nice cosy bus. While we waited then for the beginning of the tour I took Lorraine’s jacket to the truck and looped around the parking lot a couple of times. On the first loop it still felt a little like something was causing friction, especially as I turned. I noticed we were in 4 wheel drive from when I’d backed the trailer up the gravel hill the night before at the campsite. That might have been the issue so I shifted back to normal and did another loop. Maybe it was better? As I went from into reverse and parked it distinctly seemed better? Could it be a sticky brake pad? I parked and joined Lorraine in the visitor centre unconvinced of whether we have a problem or not.
The tour buses were ready to go and we just had to wait for our guides a couple of minutes. We opted for the shade as the afternoon was probably the second warmest of the trip so far — I think it managed to get to 28C. While we were in the cave for the morning tour new plants had popped into bloom — the forsythia was opening in golden yellow, transcendent in the bright sun. The cherry trees were starting to open their blooms and in the forest a few dogwoods were breaking out; Redbuds were everywhere. The buses they use are school buses in a forest green colour and made me feel half-way between a prison transportee and a high-school student. The trip to the “New” cave opening took only a few minutes but was a lovely drive through amazing pre-spring forest. Because this has been a tourist area since 1816 there are really wonderful specimens of very old-growth trees. Maybe not virgin forest but certainly some of the trees near the cave entrances are 200 years old. Even in the sinkhole adjacent the “New” entrance — dynamited in 1921 by an entrepreneur seeking his own access to the cave system for his own tours there are wonderful old trees. The entrance looks like the entrance to a missile silo — concrete bunker, steel door, no markings.
The Second Tour was very different from the first. We went through the entrance and down 280 stairs and across several bridges circling around an oval shaped cylinder under the ground — they call this a tower. Basically, water from the sink hole had dropped straight down through the limestone for hundreds of thousands of years. The view up and down the tower was truly startling. I tried not to look down but you need to watch your feet and the stairs and bridges are all made of open steel gratings. Mercifully, they had a second railing on the big bridge across the tower about half way down outside the first hand-railing. Sometimes on the stairs you actually had to lean out over the railing to avoid the walls of the cave that jutted out over the centre of the staircase. I’d have been claustrophobic but I was too afraid of the heights and vice-versa and so kept going to the bottom — 250 feet below the entrance straight down. The tour from there was pretty short — a half mile to “Grand Central Station” and on to the “Frozen Niagara” — here were the stalagmites and stalagmites you expect in a wet cave. We went down another forty-nine steps and back up and then wound our way back up the entrance — not the full 280 steps this time but enough to tire us out.
Fortunately, the truck worked fine when we got back to the visitor’s center. I assume that maybe we had a sticky brake and it will be time for a 500 dollar brake job when we get home. We rant down to Horse Cave to buy groceries and then needed to run back up to Cave City for wine because Horse Cave is in a dry county. Not a drive we wanted at that point but we did get to see some really cool old motels dating from the day when Cave City was a huge tourist resort. Lorraine’s watch showed she had climbed 30 flights of stairs.
The day had turned hot by the time we reached the entrance; not as hot as when my family was here in ‘71 or ‘72 — that day was well over 90F with a very high humidity. The Cave is mercifully cool, probably about 12C at this time of year so it felt good at first, then cool and then comfortable once we exerted a little effort. It was the same entrance we had used way back then — I can imagine that this must have been a nightmare for my parents. Johnny, my youngest brother, would have been almost 5 if we had gone in 1972 and I can’t imagine taking a five year old on this tour. It was interesting that at first the caverns were taller than I remembered as a kid then later seemed shorter as the ceiling closed down hand the passage narrowed. I also absorbed more of the interpretive discussion on the saltpetre workings near the entrance.
 |
| Lorraine navigating Fat-Man’s Misery |
The next portion of the cave made me realize that in those days I was also a lot shorter, and a lot smaller. This is the portion of the tour that passes over the bottomless chasm ( they’ve improved the bridge) and through fat-man’s misery and tall-man’s agony... I passed through those easily in those days but would not have been able to see out of the groove that is fat-man’s and would have been a little claustrophobic today except that only the bottom 4 feet of pass are tight from a girth perspective. The tall-man’s agony was trickier as it required me to walk in a narrow gap bent over almost at the waist for quite a ways while navigating tight turns. Not nearly as difficult as the name suggests but still a really interesting walk. After that, the tour varies from what I remember, instead of a very large cavern ( almost a ballroom) we went up a 10 story stair case through one of the “towers” to return to near the surface. I counted the steps 118, twisting and turning, with a few narrow passages and a few spectacular interior views up and down over 100 feet. I was really impressed that Lorraine and I both made the stairs quite easily. But by the time we regained the entrance Lorraine was struggling with the arthritis in her hip and fairly fatigued.
Returning up the stairs from the cave entrance and into the sunlight was lovely but the day had warmed and this reminded you instantly that the effort to climb out of the cave was pretty strenuous and we still had the hill to climb back to the visitor’s centre. Lorraine rested a bit on the hill and questioned the sanity of a second tour the same day.
“I really think we would have been all right with just the one tour” she said.
“Well, hopefully, a little bit of lunch and a rest will get you ready. But if you don’t feel up to it we can cancel.”
In the back of my mind I was also worrying about the truck — would I be better spending the afternoon looking for the local Ford dealer? I didn’t articulate this as I really didn’t want to give Lorraine anything else to worry about. After her rest she felt good enough to at least consider it. “All right, Lunch may help. But I really want to review what the tour guide says about this next tour before I commit to anything”.
The Hotel is right next to the top of the hill from the entrance; It dates to the early part of the last Century, about 1925, and was clearly given a bad facelift probably about the time my family was here. We opted for the restaurant with the license and table-service and started with a big glass of water and a glass of Sauvignon-Blanc and took our time with the menu. The menu was somewhat limited but the prices weren’t too bad. There was a great looking Hamburger with Mushrooms, ham and fried-egg that I thought the better of and opted for a cat-fish Po’Boy — not sick of those yet. Lorraine had a pulled-pork sandwich. The pulled pork was a little strange tasting and a tad dry — it needed more BBQ sauce and less of it’s somewhat odd wood smoke. The fries that came with it were good. The Po’boy was serviceable — not really breaded and just pan-fried so a little drier and not that airy-crispness of the sandwiches I’d had further south; probably the worst of the fish Po’boy’s I had on the trip and very likely the last.
Lunch did help Lorraine recover and the description of the next tour “Domes and Drips” seemed not to threatening and a little intriguing — there were 500 steps but the first 280 steps were all descending but the distance was only 3/4 of a mile — not too extreme. There was also a 4 mile bus ride that took time off the beginning and the end where you’d be seated in a nice cosy bus. While we waited then for the beginning of the tour I took Lorraine’s jacket to the truck and looped around the parking lot a couple of times. On the first loop it still felt a little like something was causing friction, especially as I turned. I noticed we were in 4 wheel drive from when I’d backed the trailer up the gravel hill the night before at the campsite. That might have been the issue so I shifted back to normal and did another loop. Maybe it was better? As I went from into reverse and parked it distinctly seemed better? Could it be a sticky brake pad? I parked and joined Lorraine in the visitor centre unconvinced of whether we have a problem or not.
The tour buses were ready to go and we just had to wait for our guides a couple of minutes. We opted for the shade as the afternoon was probably the second warmest of the trip so far — I think it managed to get to 28C. While we were in the cave for the morning tour new plants had popped into bloom — the forsythia was opening in golden yellow, transcendent in the bright sun. The cherry trees were starting to open their blooms and in the forest a few dogwoods were breaking out; Redbuds were everywhere. The buses they use are school buses in a forest green colour and made me feel half-way between a prison transportee and a high-school student. The trip to the “New” cave opening took only a few minutes but was a lovely drive through amazing pre-spring forest. Because this has been a tourist area since 1816 there are really wonderful specimens of very old-growth trees. Maybe not virgin forest but certainly some of the trees near the cave entrances are 200 years old. Even in the sinkhole adjacent the “New” entrance — dynamited in 1921 by an entrepreneur seeking his own access to the cave system for his own tours there are wonderful old trees. The entrance looks like the entrance to a missile silo — concrete bunker, steel door, no markings.
The Second Tour was very different from the first. We went through the entrance and down 280 stairs and across several bridges circling around an oval shaped cylinder under the ground — they call this a tower. Basically, water from the sink hole had dropped straight down through the limestone for hundreds of thousands of years. The view up and down the tower was truly startling. I tried not to look down but you need to watch your feet and the stairs and bridges are all made of open steel gratings. Mercifully, they had a second railing on the big bridge across the tower about half way down outside the first hand-railing. Sometimes on the stairs you actually had to lean out over the railing to avoid the walls of the cave that jutted out over the centre of the staircase. I’d have been claustrophobic but I was too afraid of the heights and vice-versa and so kept going to the bottom — 250 feet below the entrance straight down. The tour from there was pretty short — a half mile to “Grand Central Station” and on to the “Frozen Niagara” — here were the stalagmites and stalagmites you expect in a wet cave. We went down another forty-nine steps and back up and then wound our way back up the entrance — not the full 280 steps this time but enough to tire us out.
Fortunately, the truck worked fine when we got back to the visitor’s center. I assume that maybe we had a sticky brake and it will be time for a 500 dollar brake job when we get home. We rant down to Horse Cave to buy groceries and then needed to run back up to Cave City for wine because Horse Cave is in a dry county. Not a drive we wanted at that point but we did get to see some really cool old motels dating from the day when Cave City was a huge tourist resort. Lorraine’s watch showed she had climbed 30 flights of stairs.
I remember that trip so well, such an adventure for a little kid.
ReplyDeleteReally takes me back! I don't remember any particular problems taking small children through. I just remember that it was very hot and humid above ground and the cave was a pleasant relief. For some reason the memory of finding a smaller yellowish box tortoise on one of the trails through the forest stands out.
ReplyDelete