June 6, Friday
We crossed Tennessee in a day and entered Kentucky yesterday afternoon. The terrain is rolling hills then dips. The National Park staff explained that the dips are sinkholes where a cave or cavern has formed in the limestone rock. Mammoth Cave is the longest cave system in North America with >360 miles of mapped passages on 7 levels with many more still uncharted.
Last night we went on our first tour, by lantern light, to the Star Chamber. This room got its name in the earliest days of tourism at Mammoth Cave, about 1815, when guides would throw rocks to chip off black gypsum from the ceiling, exposing sparking white “stars”. We also saw the remains of a nitrate mine used for domestic gunpowder manufacture during the War of 1812. Calcium nitrate was mined from the cave soil, leached, piped aboveground and boiled down to precipitate saltpeter, potassium nitrate, then shipped to E.I. DuPont in Delaware for making gunpowder. The nearly 200-year-old wood is perfectly preserved, as are other artifacts left by early Woodland Indians as long as 4000 years ago.
This morning, a wild turkey and a white-tail doe strolled through camp without any notice of or concern for the dogs and us. They must know that they’re protected in the National Park. This afternoon, we’ll tour another deeper and wetter park of the cave, using the “New Entrance” deliberately created when an early cave entrepreneur dropped 26 sticks of dynamite down a sink hole.
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