Very few people ever get to feel the sense of discovery and wonder that Neil Armstrong felt when he set foot on the moon. Retired sixth grade teacher Scott House gets to feel it on a regular basis—not in space, but in middle Kentucky.
Almost every inch of our planet has been discovered. Even the great explorers of our millennium often arrived in a new land only to find that other people had gotten there first. Yet underground, a different story is being told.
Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave is the longest cave system in the world – with 390 miles explored thus far. Thanks to cavers like Scott House, more miles are discovered each year. House is president of the Cave Research Foundation, a group of volunteer spelunkers who explore and document new sections of Mammoth Cave. Every month, he goes on a new expedition into the dark depths of the unknown.
Most people are drawn to spelunking by the excitement of seeing the inside of a cave. For House, it was different. “What really attracted me to work in caves was the idea of mapping them,” he says. “I’ve always been a map freak, even when I was a little kid.”
House mapped many caves in Missouri before making his way down to Mammoth for the first time in 1983. His obsession with cartography connected him with the Cave Research Foundation, which has been documenting caves since the 1940s.
“Every time you map a foot of new passage, you set a new world record. What other endeavor can you do that with? You can only get to the top of Everest. You can’t go up any higher.”
But House doesn’t consider himself an adventure seeker. Actually, he says, thrill junkies make terrible cavers in Mammoth Cave.
“Caving is not sexy,” House explains. “It’s a slow and methodical process. You may spend eight hours surveying 150 feet of passage.”
Mammoth Cave spelunkers come from all backgrounds—doctors, teachers, bankers, and blue-collar workers ranging in age from 15 to 80. They all have a common goal to discover new terrain and make a lasting contribution.
They’re succeeding, says Rick Toomey, Director of the Mammoth Cave International Center for Science and Learning, a partnership between Mammoth Cave National Park and Western Kentucky University. Toomey facilitates scientific research at the park, connecting spelunkers with researchers.
“Mapping is no trivial thing,” explains Toomey, who has also worked in the cave as a paleontologist. “Most of the cave environment isn’t something you can detect from the surface. Aerial photos can provide valuable information about the park’s forests, but not about what’s underground.”
To survey the cave, spelunkers take measurements of distances and angles, create scale sketches of what they see, and take notes on biological and geological information. They plot the cave’s streams, mineral formations, airflows, and where people have been in the cave in the past.
In 1999, Toomey, along with park scientists and volunteer cavers, was examining the paleontological remains of animals that had used the cave. He and his colleagues were searching for tiny bones, bat guano, and raccoon scat under rocks and inside crevices. Suddenly, they found a spot along a cave wall where they could feel air coming out.
That hole led to a 1,000-foot-long passageway that no one at the park had ever seen before.
“This passage was only 30 seconds off of the tour trail tourists have been following since the early 1800s,” Toomey recalls.
Upon entering the dark passage, they discovered that no person had set foot there in at least 1,000 years.
It became apparent that there were Native American artifacts in this passage, including torch fragments and pieces of digging sticks. Yet, unlike the other 12 miles of cave known to have been first discovered by Native Americans, this route had no traces of use by any Europeans or African Americans from the 1700s or 1800s.
The rediscovery of this new stretch of Mammoth Cave paved the way for a current study headed up by archaeologist George Crothers of the University of Kentucky. Crothers seeks to better understand the Native American community that lived in this region. For instance, the existence of rock cairns in this passageway reveals that it was the Native Americans, not the Europeans, who built cairns in other parts of the park. It’s not yet clear, according to Toomey, what they used the rock cairns for.
Exploration has also made biological studies possible. There are currently three different studies on bats, for example, being conducted at Mammoth Cave National Park. One is focused on White Nose Syndrome, a disease that is wiping out bats across the eastern U.S. Other studies are looking at the hibernation of big-eared bats; how wildfires affect bats’ underground foraging; and the genetics of cave fish.
Caves are very fragile environments. They aren’t accustomed to disturbances like natural disasters. Nor do they have many large animals inhabiting them. Caves are low-energy environments with organisms that have long lives, slow metabolisms, and slow reproduction rates.
“The problem with this,” Toomey says, “is if these animal populations are damaged, they don’t recover very well.”
So it doesn’t help that part of the Mammoth Cave system is directly beneath Interstate 65.
“Anytime a car accident occurs, toxic chemicals can spill right into the cave’s watershed. Even small spills can destory populations of the cave’s crayfish, cave fish, and bats,” says Toomey. “The situation is worse for endangered animals like the Kentucky cave shrimp, where spills and accidents can wipe out the entire species,” he laments.
The volunteer cavers at Mammoth make it possible to track these populations before such an accident occurs. Plus, their work in mapping and surveying creates access points for first responders and clean-up personnel after such an accident occurs. Without the baseline data that comes from exploration, the park would have no way of managing its own wildlife.
Scott House and his teammates provide invaluable support to both the research community and the national park service. But as House points out, exploring Mammoth Cave is also just extremely cool.
Aptly named, Mammoth Cave is more than twice as long as the second longest cave in the world. It was created by the perfect recipe for a cave system: a long, thick layer of limestone; a cap of sandstone over the whole area; sinks and holes for water to permeate; and a lot of time.
The cave’s history is also humbling. It was first used by people about 10,000 years ago and first deeply explored by people about 5,000 years ago. Archaeological evidence shows that Native Americans walked for miles inside the cave for the sole purpose of exploration, says the University of Kentucky’s George Crothers. “Like humans anywhere, if you saw a hole in the ground the size of the entrance of Mammoth Cave, and it just went on and on, you would be enticed or tempted to continue. Maybe each time you went in there a little bit farther…”
Mammoth Cave is still as exhilarating today as it was thousands of years ago because of the sense of wonder that it keeps alive. In a time when we can see the street view of a corner halfway across the world with Google Maps, it’s exciting to know that deep down beneath the sandstone and limestone of middle Kentucky, there still lies a place shrouded in mystery.
Fortunately, that sense of wonder is here to stay, according to Rick Toomey. Although there are about ten expeditions charting new territory each year, it doesn’t look like the cave system will be completely discovered anytime soon.
“There’s certainly no end in sight,” he says.