The world’s longest cave
An awful lot of history fits inside a 1,000-mile cave system, said Kenan Christiansen in The New York Times. Western Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave once rivaled Niagara Falls as America’s top tourist destination, yet that’s hardly this natural wonder’s only claim to fame. Lost tribes scraped at its limestone walls 50 centuries ago. Slaves mined the same rock to produce gunpowder during the War of 1812. Two decades later, the great-great-great-grandfather of current guide Jerry Bransford was one of the daring teenage slaves who pushed deeper into the darkness, opening up the cave’s era as a virtual underground amusement park. Some 600 miles of the cave system remain unexplored, but Bransford will show you the natural rotunda where orchestras once played and the underground stream that once teemed with eyeless fish. He always stops to read the names his forebears wrote overhead with candlestick ash. “Whenever I see a signature from my kin,” he says, “I feel awed by what they did.
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