Mammoth cave

To celebrate being done with my defense and my dissertation I went to Mammoth cave with some friends for a cave tour. Mammoth cave is the longest cave system in the world with more than 400 miles of mapped cave. It is about 6 hours North of Atlanta so we left after work on Friday and got in in time to go to sleep before heading out on our caving adventure Saturday morning. The tour was a wild cave tour which meant that we got to crawl through tunnels, climb up rocks and explore. It also meant that we got to wear jumpsuits and hard hats with lights. We covered 5 miles of cave in 6 hours and it was really fun. My favorite thing was that we go to see so many different parts of the cave. We started in dusty limestone passages. As we moved further on the walls were covered with tiny gypsum crystals that looked like little stars in the cave. The further we got in the cave the more elaborate the crystals became we found gypsum flowers and big globs of gypsum called snowballs. We wiggled through tight passages and climbed up to new levels. There were tall skinny slot canyons to squeeze through. We walked past deep pits and high domes. In a series of limestone domes called the cathedral domes there were frond like formations formed by erosion of the limestone walls by falling water. Our guide hit these formations with horse shoes, each formation made a different tone. It was pretty cool. We also went through a section of the cave that was highly decorated with stalactites and stalagmites. We saw cave crickets and cave beetles, we almost saw an eyeless crayfish but it hid under a rock. 

We were all pretty tired when we got done with the tour. We recuperated at a local BBQ place called Bucky Bees. The food was delicious particularly the brisket and a baked potato called the king's ransom. The potato was as big as my head and filled with butter, cheese, sour cream, pulled pork, and barbecue sauce. Driving back to Atlanta we passed a local natural history museum. There was a T-rex standing guard by the road. It was a good end to a pretty great day.