Tom's National Park Adventure

One of the things that I like about visiting the National Parks is meeting people! While I was doing my cave tour yesterday I met a very nice woman named Margaret. Margaret is from Germany. She and her husband had their version of a camper shipped to Canada and will be spending the next year exploring North America. It is just a little bigger than Ethyl! It even has a washer and dryer in it!

While talking about The Mammoth Cave area, it is easy to think about it as two separate entities. Above ground and below ground. But in reality nothing could be further from the truth.

The 54,000 acres that make up the park are part of a giant Karst Landscape. Karst Landscapes are formed from the dissolution of soluble carbonate rocks like limestone. That means that the area above the ground is an upland dry forest. The water finds the low points and cracks on the rocks and flows in this case towards the Green River underground. While doing so, the water carves through the rock over time and creates the cave systems. This is not a fast process! It takes time but in the end….. the rock doesn’t have a chance.

I decided to do several hikes in the area. The area is heavily wooded and there are caves and sinkholes everywhere. There are many different hikes available. There are hike available to meet everyone’s needs and abilities.

The first hike I did was the Sand Cave hike. This hike is entirely on Wooden boardwalks and takes you to the site where Floyd Collin’s was trapped 60 feet underground. The rescue attempt brought much attention to the area and was the defining event that led to the creation of the National Park. During the rescue attempt there were as many as 10,000 people who showed up to watch the spectacle!

After leaving the Sand Cave area, I stopped at one of the many cemeteries in the area. I was able to find a couple of headstones where the person was born in the 1700’s!

The next hike I did was the

Cedar Sink trail. This trail is about two miles in length. It has steps that bring you down into a large sinkhole where you can actually see one of the underwater streams that hits the surface for a little bit prior to continuing underground.

The last hike I did was around Sloans Crossing Pond. Surface water in a Karst Landscape is kind of rare. Because the area is comprised primarily of Limestone, any water introduced tends to flow underground. In order to find a body of surface water, the underlying surfaces need to be made up of insoluble materials like Sandstone and Shale.

Sloan’s Crossing Pond is that type of area. It is a pond that formed naturally, but also got a little help from the engineers of the CCC in the early 1930’s. They were trying to give the local wildlife a little help by making the pond bigger.

While hiking around the pond, I ran into these people. They were in the middle of getting ready to live stream a “Ranger Talk” to over 7,000 fourth graders around the country! I found it extremely interesting that they were using Elon Musk’s StarLink system to do the live stream. All it took was a little generator and they were bringing the park to kids who will probably never be able to visit it!

I love that!

After my hikes……. I headed back to St Louis and arrived at my condo by 6:30pm

I’ll post again when I head out to get another stamp in the passport! For now…. Enjoy your holidays!