ץ Mammoth Cave. I'm just back from a two-day vacation to Mammoth Cave. Despite lots of rain the first day, a temperature drop of 40 or so degrees the second day, and a daughter who came down with a fever, we had a very good time. The park is deserted in January, and we only had about 12 people on our cave tour (that is, my family and 6 others) and were only charged $50 for a room at the park hotel. I could get a double stroller from the parking lot down to the historic cave entrance carrying a girl on my shoulders, and the kids didn't need to see much cave to be impressed. That is actually more rational than adults, since after you've seen the first mile of cave, the next 349 don't look all that different. The real thrill of caving is in the irrational but delightful feeling that something amazing is going to turn up shortly, combined with the only slightly more rational but also entertaining fear that all your lights will go out and you will die in the dark.

One odd thing about the park is that as you can see from this map, about half the park is north of the Green River, which is the limit of geological feasibility for extensions of Mammoth Cave. Why include that land? Also, it seems that around 1930 or so when the park began, eminent domain was used to seize the land of some hundreds of farm families. Why? The park would have worked just as well by taking their underground rights, perhaps with regulation of polluting above-ground activities. (Note that the federal government itself built Interstate I-65 not far from the park, which sends quite a bit of oily goo into the cave). There are numerous signs that the current top management of the park is incompetent, including not just the broken outdoor tour video listing and the broken wheelchair entrance button at the visitor center and park guides that lack a local phone number for tour information, but a website that doesn't give current information on what tours are available and shows pitifully unimpressive photos, most of which feature the mediocre post-1930 forest above the cave. The Park seems embarassed that the Cave is so impressive, and heavily pushes the above-ground part of the park, not understanding that there is a reason visitors ignore it. See, instead, the Kentucky caves website that has at least the photo I've shown here. Of course, I forgot to bring my own camera, so who am I to talk of incompetence?

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