Category Archives: Kentucky State Park

Our Eclipse Trip (Part 9 – Mammoth Cave & Big Bone Lick)

(Continued from Part 8 …)

Mammoth Cave!

So, we finally made it along the narrow Kentucky roads to Mammoth Cave National Park.  The place was tucked back in some lovely forested hills, and the Visitor Center was very well attended.  So well attended, in fact, that there was only about 2/3rd of a single RV spot left to park in, as most of them were filled with cars!  As I parked in as tightly as I could, and went back to see if cars could get by. I wasn’t as happy as I could have been, but upon starting to walk to the Center, I noted that someone was heading for the bus, and it turned out they were moving the car in front of it, so I moved the bus up and was much more comfortably parked.

At the beginning of the path looking up toward the level of the Visitor Center.

We hit the well appointed bathrooms, then went to see about tours.  I had done some research on the tours, when looking at Mammoth Cave as a destination, but not about making advance reservations.  All but the self-guided walking tour of the shallowest, historic cave entrance tour were sold out! So, we got our tickets and made our way to the entrance, which was down a fairly steep path from the center.

The park is in south central Kentucky, and consists not only of the caves, but an area of the Green River valley (and hills around it).  The geology is a limestone ‘karst’, where the groundwaters seep into the limestone bedrock and erode it away, letting groundwaters flow deeper underground, sometimes creating underground lakes and destabilizing more bedrock causing rockfalls, or for the waters to find even deeper paths to follow.  These can create cave systems as waters flow to greater depths, and previously used in/outflows are left dry and unused by the water.

Mammoth Cave is the longest surveyed system, stretching more than 390 miles with potential for as much as a 1000 mile system.  This length is determined as having a way for a human to climb/swim through naturally existing openings, but not through active mining activities.

Heading down into the caves.

The historic entrance is where we entered, walking over a shoe cleaning pad (because of the white nose fungus that attacks bats) and then down a stairway to get us down into the caves. While this entrance looks massive, there are places just inside the baffle doors where it’s less than 6 feet tall and you have to watch your head.

Plenty of space.

But then you wind around a curve, and the whole thing opens up.  Quite a bit of the cave along through here was mined for calcium nitrate (saltpeter) during the War of 1812, but was later used briefly as a tuberculosis hospital, as well as a tourist attraction.

I’m in this picture for scale …

While we could only explore a small amount of the miles and miles of cave,  But that was kind of okay, as the cave was kind of chilly compared to the hot, sunny, summer day outside.  We chatted with some of the park rangers who were explaining about the caves and answering questions, and spent an hour and a half or so inside the cave.

Where the River Styx comes aboveground.

While the caves are the main attraction of the park, there are lots of trails that cover the hills too.  We spent some time walking further down from the historic entrance toward the Green River (which used to have a riverboat stop), where we turned aside to see where the ‘River Styx’ exits the cave complex at its deepest levels.

Our son said it was either named by a dog, or someone with a low sense of humor …

After some more hiking around and then climbing back up to the Visitor’s Center, we get back onto the bus and headed off to our stop for the night. It was a short trip on the smaller roads to get out to I-65, and then it was an easy trip to I-71, then another short trip on the smaller roads to get to Big Bone Lick, which we arrived at just before dark!

Some of a bison bison recovered from the salt lick.

Big Bone Lick is actually a place where salt deposits from the evaporation of an ancient sea are getting redissolved into underground springs which bring the saline water to the surface.

They have a friendly giant sloth at the museum.

Animals would come to the area to literally lick at the ground, but the moist soil in some areas would be like a quicksand that the animals ( including forms of bison, caribou, deer, elk, horse, mammoth, mastodon, moose, musk ox, peccary, sloth, and possibly tapir) who gathered could get mired in, and after they sank in, the salty soils could help preserve the bones from decomposition. Plenty of prominent people (like Lewis and Clark) came during the 1700’s & 1800’s for scientific investigation and study of the remains.

The campgrounds were pretty nice, with each site having electric hookups and every two sites sharing water hookups where we were. That said, there were rules about not washing dishes by the hookups or in the restrooms, so we took our dirty dishes with us, not having the plumbing tanks in place.

A nice view from the bedroom.

The sites backed up on some nice greenery, though some had some significant slope.  I used some 2x material to level us up. Just at the top of the hill, at the end of the loop, was a trail that led along to the Visitor’s Center/museum and the bison pasture.

Live bison, not fossils.

We spent some of the morning at the museum, and then watching the bison.  They have a nice-sized herd, with both adults and young.

It’s waffle time!

After this, we set off to make our way to Buffalo.  We did make a stop at a Waffle House in Ohio, but otherwise we made the trip in good time.  While it was (surprise) dark when we got home, we were back, and all worked out well for us on the trip – it was a success!

Our Eclipse Trip (Part 1)

The total solar eclipse of August 21, 2017 was the first one that we would be able to get to and view.  Buffalo had an annular  eclipse (the moon is farther from the Earth, producing a ‘Ring of Fire’) in 1994, but it was too overcast to see, and the previous visible total eclipse was in 1925!   So we had planned for this for a couple of years to get the right place to be to see it well.

LOOK BACK: Walter Cronkite covers the 1979 eclipse

I had scoped out the Dixon Springs State Park in Illinois as a nearly perfect place to stay.  It was about midway between the point of maximum coverage and maximum duration.  I emailed back and forth with one of the park officials who identified the best sites to fit our bus, and let me know that the site reservation window would open on January 1, 2017 for the August reservations.

However, when I logged into ReserveAmerica to grab one of the sites, I found them ALL booked.  It turns out that the state of Illinois had decided to capitalize on the eclipse for tourism, and had rolled their reservation window back to November and promoted their state sites!  Scrambling a bit, I found the Fort Massac State Park, adjacent to Metropolis, Illinois.

French Fort De L’Ascension/Massac on the left and reconstructed American Fort Massac on the right.

Fort Massac was originally founded by the French in 1757 as Fort De L’Ascension, and was rebuilt and renamed Massac during the end of the French and Indian War.  While the British nominally owned the territory afterward, the fort itself was burned by the local Cherokee by the time the British got there.

Reconstructed American Fort Massac (minus the log palisades).

The Americans got into the act when General George Washington ordered the fort reconstructed in 1794, and for the next 20 years it served as a military post, sometimes called the ‘Gibraltar of the Ohio’ due to it’s elevation and view of the river. Notable figures of Merriweather Lewis and William Clark camped at Fort Massac in 1803 as they made preparations for their Corps of Discovery expedition to the newly purchased Louisiana Territory.

The sign says it all …

Metropolis was laid out as a formal town in 1839, and it was hoped that it would be a transportation and commerce hub. It is now a city of about 6000 people, and is best known as the home of Superman (this is official, both from DC Comics and the Illinois State Legislature!).

 

A tiny fraction of the stone tool collection at Fort Massac.

As we were to find out, the Fort Massac Visitor Center there is mostly museum! They have a great collection of native american stone artifacts (from all over Illinois), and French and American artifacts recovered from the forts.

But most important for me was the fact that Fort Massac was still within the band of totality for the eclipse, and was only about 16 miles from Dixon Springs, so we wouldn’t lose much (about 10 seconds of totality) from being dead-center along the eclipse line. Within a few minutes, I had a site chosen and booked.  We had a place to camp for the eclipse!

Then we had to get there.  The longest trip that we’d taken the bus on was from Buffalo to Ohiopyle, PA (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3) and back which was a measly 600 miles or so.  This was going to be some 1600 miles, so it would be our biggest foray to date.

Our (rather grainy) route map for the Eclipse Trip

We had limited time to make the trip, and decided on a few key places to stop on our trip.  We had some friends in Cincinnati, OH who we could stop and see, the Embroiderer’s Guild of America Headquarters were in Louisville, KY, as was the Bulleit Bourbon Distillery tour (at the historic Stitzel-Weller Distillery), all on the way to Fort Massac.  On the way back, we could stop at Mammoth Caves and Big Bone Lick (where we could camp for the night).

With all this planned out, the next thing was packing and provisioning the bus. And then, of course, setting out on the journey …

(Continued in Part 2)