Mammoth Cave National Park
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| Mammoth Cave National Park | |
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| IUCN Category II (National Park) | |
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| Location | Edmonson, Hart, and Barren counties, Kentucky, USA |
| Nearest city | Cave City |
| Coordinates | |
| Area | 52,835 acres (214 km²) |
| Established | July 1, 1941 |
| Visitors | 597,934 (in 2006) |
| Governing body | National Park Service |
| Mammoth Cave National Park* | |
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| UNESCO World Heritage Site | |
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| Type | Natural |
| Criteria | vii, viii, x |
| Reference | 150 |
| Region† | Europe and North America |
| Inscription history | |
| Inscription | 1981 (5th Session) |
| * Name as inscribed on World Heritage List. † Region as classified by UNESCO. |
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Mammoth Cave National Park is a U.S. National Park in central Kentucky, encompassing portions of Mammoth Cave, the longest cave system known in the world. The official name of the system is the Mammoth Cave System for the ridge under which the cave has formed. The park was established as a national park on July 1, 1941. It became a World Heritage Site on October 27, 1981, and an international Biosphere Reserve on September 26, 1990.
The park's 52,830 acres (214 km²) are located primarily in Edmonson County, Kentucky, with small areas extending eastward into Hart County and Barren County. It is centered around the Green River, with a tributary, the Nolin River, feeding into the Green just inside the park. The Green River is dammed near the western boundary of the park, so that the river only flows freely for a small section in the eastern part of the park.
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[edit] Limestone labyrinth
Mammoth Cave developed in thick Mississippian-aged limestone strata capped by a layer of sandstone, making the system remarkably stable. It is known to include more than 367 miles (591 kilometers) of passageway; new discoveries and connections add several miles to this figure each year.
The upper sandstone member is known as the Big Clifty Sandstone: thin, sparse layers of limestone interspersed within the sandstones give rise to an epikarstic zone, in which tiny conduits (cave passages too small to enter) are dissolved. The epikarstic zone concentrates local flows of runoff into high-elevation springs which emerge at the edges of ridges. The resurgent water from these springs typically flows briefly on the surface before sinking underground again at elevation of the contact between the sandstone caprock and the underlying massive limestones. It is in these underlying massive limestone layers that the human-explorable caves of the region are developed.
The limestone layers of the stratigraphic column beneath the Big Clifty, in increasing order of depth below the ridgetops, are the Girkin Formation, the Ste. Genevieve Limestone, and the St. Louis Limestone. For example, the large Main Cave passage seen on the Historic Tour is located at the bottom of the Girkin and the top of the St. Genevieve.
Each of the primary layers of limestone are divided further into named units and subunits. One area of cave research involves correlating the stratigraphy with the cave survey produced by explorers. This makes it possible to produce three dimensional approximate maps of the contours of the various layer boundaries without the necessity for test wells and extracting core samples.
The upper sandstone caprock is relatively hard for water to penetrate: the exceptions are where vertical cracks occur. This protective role means that many of the older, upper passages of the cave system are very dry, with no stalactites, stalagmites, or other formations which require flowing or dripping water to develop.
However, the sandstone caprock layer has been dissolved and eroded at many locations within the park, such as the Frozen Niagara room. The "contact" between limestone and sandstone can be found by hiking from the valley bottoms to the ridgetops: typically, as one approaches the top of a ridge, the outcrops of exposed rock seen change in composition from limestone to sandstone at a well-defined elevation, neglecting slump blocks of sandstone which have broken off the ridgetops and tumbled down the limestone slopes below.
At one valley bottom in the southern region of the park, a massive sinkhole has developed. Known as "Cedar Sink," the sinkhole features a small river entering one side and disappearing back underground at the other side.
Mammoth Cave is home to the endangered Kentucky cave shrimp, a sightless albino shrimp.
[edit] Visiting
The National Park Service offers several cave tours to visitors. Many of the most famous features of the cave, such as Grand Avenue, Frozen Niagara, and Fat Man's Misery, can be seen on lighted tours ranging from one to six hours in length. Two tours, lit only by visitor-carried paraffin lamps, are popular alternatives to the electric-lit routes. Several "wild" tours venture away from the developed parts of the cave into muddy crawls and dusty tunnels.
The park's tours are notable for the quality of the interpretive program, with occasional graphics accompanying artifacts on display at certain points in the cave. The lectures delivered by the National Park Service cave guides are varied by tour, so that in taking several tours the visitor learns about different facets of the cave's formation, or of the cave's human history and prehistory. Most guides are quite knowledgeable and open to visitor's questions. Many guides include a "theatrical" component, making their presentations entertaining with gentle humor. The guide traditions at Mammoth Cave date back to the period just after the War of 1812, and to guides such as Stephen Bishop. The style of this humor itself is part of the living tradition of the cave guides, and is duly a part of the interpretive program.
The Echo River Tour, one of the cave's most famous attractions, used to take visitors on a boat ride along an underground river. The tour was discontinued for logistic and environmental reasons in the early 1990s.[1]
Interested members of the public can join an Earthwatch.org sponsored field survey of the history of Mammoth Cave.[2] However, due to Mammoth Cave park regulations, participation on this project is restricted to US citizens only.
[edit] Park superintendents
- Robert P. Holland; September 2, 1936 – June 21, 1938; acting
- R. Taylor Hoskins; June 22, 1938 – June 30, 1941; acting
- R. Taylor Hoskins; July 1, 1941 – March 31, 1951
- Thomas C. Miller; April 1, 1951 – June 30, 1954
- Perry E. Brown; July 1, 1954 – September 14, 1963
- Paul McG. Miller; September 15, 1963 – December 30, 1965
- John A. Aubuchon; January 2, 1966 – September 7, 1968
- Robert H. Bendt; September 8, 1968 – January 23, 1971; assigned line supervision of Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historic Site, September 2, 1970 – April 27, 1975
- Joseph Kulesza; February 21, 1971 – May 31, 1976
- Albert A. Hawkins; July 4, 1976 – August 11, 1979
- Robert L. Deskins; August 12, 1979 – September 1, 1984
- Richard N. Strange; September 2, 1984 – December 8, 1984; acting
- Franklin D. Pridemore; December 9, 1984 – January 2, 1988
- David A. Mihalic; January 3, 1988 – July 1994[5]
- Ronald R. Switzer; March 1995 – January 2005
- Bruce Powell; January 2005 – January 2006; acting
- Patrick Reed; January 2006 –[6]
[edit] History
The story of human beings in relation to Mammoth Cave spans six thousand years.
[edit] Prehistory
Several sets of Native American remains have been recovered from Mammoth Cave, or other nearby caves in the region, in both the 19th and 20th centuries, by 1813 on the early side (the "Short Cave Mummy.") Most mummies found present examples of intentional burial, with ample evidence of pre-Columbian funerary practice.
An exception to purposeful burial was discovered when in 1935 the remains of an adult male were discovered by Grover Campbell and Lyman Cutliff under a large boulder. The boulder had shifted and settled onto the victim, a pre-Columbian miner, who had disturbed the rubble supporting it. The remains of the ancient victim were named "Lost John" and exhibited to the public into the 1970s, when they were interred in a secret location in Mammoth Cave for reasons of preservation as well as emerging political sensitivities with respect to the public display of Native American remains.
Research beginning in the late 1950s led by Dr. Patty Jo Watson of Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri has done much to illuminate the lives of the late Archaic and early Woodland peoples who explored and exploited caves in the region. Preserved by the constant cave environment, dietary evidence yielded carbon dates enabling Dr. Watson and others to determine the age of the specimens, and an analysis of their content, also pioneered by Dr. Watson, allows determination of the relative content of plant and meat in the diet of either culture over a period spanning several thousand years. This analysis indicates a timed transition from a hunter-gatherer culture to plant domestication and agriculture.
Another technique employed in archaeological research at Mammoth Cave was "experimental archaeology", also an innovation of Dr. Watson's, in which modern explorers were sent into the cave using the same technology as that employed by the ancient cultures whose leftover implements lie discarded in many parts of the cave. The goal was to gain insight into the problems faced by the ancient people who explored the cave, by placing the researchers in a similar physical situation.
Ancient human remains and artifacts within the caves are protected by various federal and state laws. One of the most basic facts to be determined about a newly discovered artifact is its precise location and situation. Even slightly moving a prehistoric artifact contaminates it from a research perspective. Explorers are properly trained not to disturb archaeological evidence, and some areas of the cave remain out-of-bounds for even seasoned explorers, unless the subject of the trip is archaeological research on that area.
Besides the remains that have been discovered near the historic entrance of Mammoth Cave, the remains of cane torches used by Native Americans were found in Salts Cave in Flint Ridge.
[edit] Earliest known history
The 31,000-acre (130 km²) tract known as the "Pollard Survey" was sold by indenture September 10, 1791 in Philadelphia by William Pollard. 19,897 acres (80.52 km²) of the "Pollard Survey" between the North bank of Bacon Creek and the Green River (Kentucky) were purchased by Thomas Lang, Jr., a British American merchant from York County, England on June 3, 1796, for £4,116.13S. The land was lost to a local county tax claim during the War of 1812.
Legend has it that the first European to discover Mammoth Cave was John Houchin, in 1797. While hunting, Houchin pursued a wounded bear to the cave's large entrance opening near the Green River. Countervailing against this story is Brucker and Watson's The Longest Cave, which asserts that the cave was "certainly known before that time."
The land containing this Historic Entrance was first surveyed and registered in 1798 under the name of Valentine Simons. Simons began exploiting Mammoth Cave for its saltpeter reserves. Calcium nitrate (Ca(NO3)2) deposited as bat guano was leached from cave soils and converted via double replacement reaction with potash (potassium carbonate, empirical formula K2CO3) to produce Potassium nitrate (KNO3) or saltpeter, an ingredient of gunpowder.
[edit] 19th century
In partnership with Valentine Simon, various other individuals would own the land through the War of 1812, when Mammoth Cave's saltpeter reserves became significant due to the British blockade of United States's ports. The blockade starved the American military of saltpeter and therefore gunpowder. As a result, the domestic price of saltpeter rose and production based on nitrates extracted from caves such as Mammoth Cave became more lucrative.
In July 1812, the cave was purchased from Simon and other owners by Charles Wilkins and an investor from Philadelphia named Hyman Gratz. Soon the cave was being mined for calcium nitrate on an industrial scale.
A half-interest in the cave changed hands for ten thousand dollars (a huge sum at the time). After the war when prices fell, the workings were abandoned and it became a minor tourist attraction centering on a Native American mummy discovered nearby.
When Wilkins died his estate's executors sold his interest in the cave to Gratz. In the spring of 1838, the cave was sold by the Gratz brothers to Franklin Gorin, who intended to operate Mammoth Cave purely as a tourist attraction,