See more on TripAdvisor ». My family did the 2 hour hike today. It was awesome. Saw some bats flying around. That was cool. Different cave then other 4 in the area. I would recomend to anyone that like hiking. I didn't do the small one but big one was great. Amazing experience. Our tour was great, the cave was very interesting, but they're is not a bathroom or running water anywhere. They have been open for three years and still do not have a bathroom rebuilt.
Like most people we are wondering where the money went to build the running bathroom. My family enjoyed this Cave tour. Different formations that looked like things.
Picture looks like an wise old owl. Rothrock commercialized it in and joined the raging competition among Midwest cave-owners, most of whom made wild claims about having the cave that Jesse James hid out in, or having the biggest cave in the world, and such things. Wyandotte Cave was widely advertised as having 25 miles of passageways. That figure was drastically revised downward to eight miles after the cave was bought and surveyed by the state of Indiana. This figure is disputed by the cave's manager.
Recent discoveries may push that estimate higher. We inched past the hundred black holes opened by the underground water that has cut and shaped everything in this cave system, suddenly emerging into a huge chamber some 60 feet high. Water did all of this. What water did, over the centuries, was to move slabs of stone, polish them, etch them, and leave them as forms to gape at in wonder. We found traces of epsom salts in it, suddenly coming across an eruption of outreaching fingers of stone, and then slipping down farther into a deeper region of rock.
Even without the multicolor lighting, which seems a bit like bringing extra icing to a wedding cake, the stone has taken on various unstonelike textures, becoming at one time fleshlike, then again moonlike. The hanging curtains of stalactites look almost lacy in places. Clusters of bats, as many as in a cluster, hang from overarching ceilings, far above and quite harmless. Round nodules of stone have been flattened into pancake proportions.
Nowhere is one more aware of the mass of stone in this cave system than at the site we had passed earlier in the tour, Monument Mountain, which John King says is the largest underground mountain in the country.
And for one second you are in the indeterminate belly of the earth, a place as far apart as anything you can find. Practical information:. Both of the longer tours are for those who are willing to do some rigorous crawling and climbing. The 8-hour trip is for advanced cave explorers.
The cave is open 7 days a week until Labor Day, a nd then it is closed on Mondays. Summer hours are , winter, Jackets are recommended on all tours, as the year-round cave temperature is degrees. Next month: Wisconsin Wilderness. Already a subscriber? Monitor journalism changes lives because we open that too-small box that most people think they live in.
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