Daylight filtered through the cheap curtains of our cabin. On Sunday, November 16, 2025, I can’t tell you how many people were waking up within the boundaries of Mammoth Cave National Park. Maybe some lodge employees? A few people staying there? A couple of hardy souls RV/tent camping down the road? But I can tell you that there was basically nobody out there to disturb Elizabeth and myself from enjoying a bright fall morning.
This was the last day of our 48-hour whirlwind introduction to Kentucky. By this coming evening, I would be back on a flight to spend the rest of the week in Oklahoma, while Elizabeth would be getting settled into the IAEM conference in Louisville for the week. Spending a few days away from each other isn’t super uncommon given our busy lives, so I was a little surprised at how bittersweet the end to a three-day trip felt.
But it wasn’t the bitter end yet. We still had a full Sunday ahead of us. That included a 9:45 guided cave tour with the Mammoth Cave park rangers again: the Domes and Dripstones tour. Another of Mammoth’s most popular tours, this one finished in the famed Frozen Niagara portion of the cave. But before we worry about any of that: breakfast.
Like I said at lunchtime the day before, the Green River Grill won’t go down in the history books as the fanciest meal one could possibly eat. But it was solid and it was filling.
Elizabeth was much less fidgety waiting for the tour to convene at the pavilion than the day before. That could be because she was more confident in the process. Maybe she was too tired from adventuring to be worried. Or maybe she felt good about us being in the right spot because she could see the park-owned school buses that would be shuttling us to the Domes and Dripstones entrance.
You see, this tour doesn’t enter the cave from the same spot. This time around, we were going in from a sinkhole somewhere down the road. Our tour guide (different than yesterday’s, although she also commented that this was her last time giving this tour) held up the group just inside of the rim of the sinkhole to give the opening spiel. This cave entrance was a little different than the Historic Entrance, which had been a yawning hole in the ground worthy of welcoming me to the largest cave system in the world. This… looked like somebody’s bunker that they built in 1963 in the middle of the Cold War.
But I’ll tell you what, it doesn’t really matter how things look from the outside. It’s the inside of a cave that you should judge. And really quickly, as our tour took stair after stair down into the bowels of the cave, I found myself feeling charitably inclined toward the Domes and Dripstones route. Perhaps too charitably inclined: when I stopped at a location to try to snap a quick exposure shot, a guy behind me hit me with the “Ok camera boy, let’s pick up the pace”. First of all: come on now, dog. It took me 10 seconds to catch back up to Elizabeth in front of me. Nobody was being held up. Second of all: come on now, dog. Camera boy?
After the long staircase down, there was a big room with bleachers for everyone to sit down and listen to some cave facts. I’m guessing 60-80% of what gets said on all of the Mammoth Cave tours – and to be honest, there are plenty – is shared stuff. We’re going to turn out the lights and show everyone what complete darkness looks like! Think about how the cave has looked exactly the same for however many millennia! The cave all around you was worn away by acid breaking down softer rock over time! With that said, the remaining 20-40% brought in some interesting tidbits that a geography/geology nerd like me could enjoy. For example: the subway-style shape of some of these tunnel passages (the same shape I’d seen yesterday) comes about when an old underground river passage is undercut by an even deeper one, emptying the previous passage of any water. Eventually the process of cave collapse/crumbling finds its equilibrium in the strong natural shape of an arch, at which point the cave is pretty much in stasis from now until the end of history. I’m sure among the dozens of tour guests, someone was feeling claustrophobic about having hundreds of feet of pure rock above them. Hopefully this helped them.
Hopefully this doesn’t sound too spoiled, but the first half or so of the Domes and Dripstones tour wasn’t anything “special”. There were some dry passages that had that subway shape, which was kind of neat. But after a while it got a little bit repetitive. The Historic Tour the day before had always had something interesting to ponder either naturally or historically. This was less consistent in that regard.
But the second half of the Domes and Dripstones tour was the very pinnacle of cave tourism. As the park ranger pointed out, this was a unique spot in the entire complex. Unlike the majority of Mammoth Cave, which is so huge in large part because of how dry it is, the Frozen Niagara region is fed by trickles of seeping water, which allows them to form some of those cave features that we all know and love: stalagmites, stalactites, and the smooth, slick looking beautiful pillars of tufa. In a way, it’s kind of sad. With each drip this part of Mammoth Cave is slowly filling itself in from the bottom up and the top down. While the rest will endure, Frozen Niagara will one day disappear. But also, this spot was just unbelievably pretty.
I don’t have very many pictures from this section, which I suppose is a regret. The “Camera Boy” dig stung. But this part of the tour was a little more self-paced than the single-file lines elsewhere, so I got a few snaps off. Some of them even were unblurry.
No pictures of the waterfall that trickles down into the middle of the cave just above Frozen Niagara, which is too bad. Nor any of several other really incredible features. But of the ones that do exist, I have to say that the pictures actually come close to capturing the beauty of the cave. And that’s pretty rare. I also have this picture of Elizabeth approaching a bridge over a small subterranean pond:
Does anybody smile the way Elizabeth smiles in a national park? So serene.
The very ending of this tour featured a lot of uphill slogging toward the surface. There was a section that was just chock full of cave crickets – so thick on the ground that it was stained with cricket guano. Those crickets are among the creepier bugs I’ve ever seen – it seems like they’re all antennae, and they just wave them around in the air in the dim lighting of the cave. I am emphatically not a fan. After seeing those things, it was almost a relief to breach the surface and squint in the familiar sunlight. Cave crickets don’t go above-ground, right?
We squished through the shoe-cleaning stations and got back on the green school buses for the short ride back to the visitor center. It was still only noon central time and a beautiful day beckoned with the remaining couple of hours before it was time to head back to Louisville. The day before, a park ranger had marked up a map with a couple of short trails and spots to see at the park’s surface. We’d already seen Cedar Sink, but there are some trails behind the visitor center that lead all the way down and along the Green River that he recommended as well. This all worked out nicely because Elizabeth wanted to see and potentially get a picture down the hill at the historic entrance anyway (we ended up getting a very quick one because there were families down there doing full Christmas-card-ass photos).
The trail did take us down to Dixon Cave, another small outlet in the hillside just below the Historic Entrance. You aren’t allowed into Dixon Cave because the NPS is giving the bats a nice, sheltered place to rest.
Beyond Dixon Cave, the path goes downhill another couple hundred vertical feet all the way to the Green River. I can’t emphasize how great it was to be out on a crisp fall day like this, with filtered sunlight through the absolutely giant trees on the bluffs and yellow leaves pinwheeling around. Every step felt – and this sounds corny but I remember thinking it at the time – like a gift from God himself.
At the bottom of the trail the mighty Green River flowed from north to south. In fact, this late into the year, the river was noticeably less mighty. You could tell that the river reaches a much greater level during flood periods, which this definitely was not. Still, it gets a nice steady flow of cold cave water when it flows past Mammoth Cave. One of those percolations of cave water can be seen from the bottom of the trail. It’s the aptly named River Styx Spring, draining one of the subterranean rivers that you can actually tour follow via guided tour (I guess we have a reason to go back now!). There wasn’t a formal path that led directly down to the water, but there was what looked like a well-used social trail. Elizabeth kept me to the straight and narrow (literally).
Instead of making an immediate beeline back for our car, Elizabeth and I kept going along the Green River Bluffs trail.
The trail rose gently higher and higher above the water, which I must say was green enough to warrant the river being named as such. The gorge was actually pretty neat and I kept hoping for a good viewpoint, but it was next to impossible to actually get the underbrush to clear up. It seems like you see this a lot at national parks, especially the older ones that were established in the pre-Depression days. I would imagine the CCC trails that were built close to a century ago served their purpose nicely in bringing people to viewpoints back then, but now they are overgrowing again.
Given my love of rivers, those glimpses weren’t quite enough. Fortunately, there’s another spot just downstream. It is in fact the only river crossing in all of Mammoth Cave National Park. And it’s not even a bridge! The Green River Ferry is one of those little boats you can drive up onto that will then move like 50 yards and let you off. Unfortunately, the ferry was damaged in a spring 2025 flood and was down for repairs when we visited (update: it actually just opened back up a few days ago in March 2026). You know that we would have driven across it for no other reason than to ride the ferry if we could have.
This was also the mouth of the Echo River, the same river we had come close to the night before on the Historic Tour. Echo River Spring is accessible via a short 1-mile walking loop. Here is the spring/river entering the Green:
Crowds hadn’t been overwhelming by the visitor center, but even here a mile away it was completely empty. There was a bench by the river along the trail and I stopped, took a seat, and just enjoyed the silence for about 5 minutes. It is a firm belief of mine that if we put our phones away, sat on a bench, and took 5 minutes to enjoy the silence a few times a day, everyone’s lives would be improved.
With that, the list of things left to do in Mammoth Cave had grown just about as empty as our stomachs. It was time to bid the park adieu after a really fun 24 hours. I’m still a little surprised at just how much regret I felt at having to leave, even though this wasn’t a “major” adventure.
There was still a major question left to be answered though: does Kentucky Fried Chicken taste better when you get it in the heart of Kentucky? Fortunately for inquiring minds, there was a KFC along the Interstate outside of Cave City. We got there around 2:00 to put the scientific question to the test. The answer: a resounding “no”. It doesn’t matter where you get it, KFC is just mediocre fast food. Get Popeyes or Bojangles instead, folks.
Elizabeth handled traffic from the passenger seat between Cave City and downtown Louisville medium-well, I would say. I think both of us were ready to take a break from driving well before we’d got into the heart of the city. Fortunately, my coworker Bruce had suggested a regional ice cream chain called Graeter’s. You know it’s more of a Cincinnati thing because they have a “Skyline spice” flavor that includes oyster crackers in the ice cream. Elizabeth shocked me a bit by boldly ordering this flavor while I remained a bit more tame. She seemed to like it, though I was a little more take-it-or-leave-it on that flavor.
After that break I took Elizabeth all the way into the city to the Convention Center so she could get her poster set up for her presentation the next day. It was kind of neat seeing Elizabeth in her specific element at an emergency management conference (which she ended up enjoying a ton, if I recall) – it was a proud spouse moment. Once she was registered and her poster was set up, I drove her a couple of blocks down to the waterfront and dropped her off at the Galt Hotel.
Driving back toward the Louisville Airport I was again struck by how much I wished the weekend wasn’t over. The next day would be my birthday and I had a nice round of golf lined up with Sam, so it’s not like it was going to be a lonely week for me. But there is something so special about these one-off, three-day trips that Elizabeth and I go on. We get along so well and get to see so many of the underrated gems of America this way.
I’ve been to Mammoth Cave twice now in my life. Don’t know if there will be a 3rd trip, though Louisville is a neat city and going to the Kentucky Derby one day would be really cool. However it turns out, I’m so glad that we spent my birthday weekend in the cave country.
