We happened to be in the Mammoth Cave area to show my grandchildren what caves were all about. I’ve always loved the Cave City exit off I-65 and have been to Mammoth Cave many times over the years. But I had not been back there in around ten years, certainly before Covid, so my wife and I were very surprised to find their new reservation system clunky. Granted, Mammoth Cave is the longest cave system in the world and is quite a treasure in the United States. It’s a top-class national park, and if there is something I love, it’s National Parks. So the Mammoth Cave National Park is a busy one. But unlike in the past, where you could show up the same day you wanted to tour the cave, now you have to schedule your tour weeks and months in advance. And ahead of our trip with the grandkids and all their parents, we found out a week ahead of our visit that all the tours were booked up. However, during June and July, Mammoth Cave does offer self-guided tours, which is all I was interested in anyway. My kids were not interested in listening to someone talk for two hours. They wanted to go and explore things at their own pace. So we did that tour and gave the kids exposure to one of the greatest cave systems in the world, so they could say that they had been there and done it, essentially.
Yet, many caves in the area extend outside the National Park borders. So I planned to take the kids to some of the privately owned caves, which I hoped would be much more customer friendly. And that’s precisely what happened. In addition to exploring Mammoth Cave, we went to Onyx Cave, which is right off the exit in Cave City. It was very nice, and the kids could get much more adventurous with the cave system itself. The tour guides were much looser than the stiff-necked Mammoth Cave guides, who have too many rules to have fun and are way too wrapped up in hippie conservation talk. Every time you breathe in a National Park cave, some government employee is crying about humans’ impact on the earth that might affect cave growth. But not at Onyx Cave. It was a very enjoyable experience, and the grandkids could learn a lot about caves and get adventurous without stepping into the actual category of “spelunking.” They were too little for rough cave exploring yet, complete with lights on helmets and crawling through passages on your belly. The trail at Onyx Cave was great; it had a lot of steps, and we could see many stalagmites and stalactites up close. And the tour was just long enough to be interesting without getting boring. After those two experiences, I wasn’t satisfied that the kids had explored caves sufficiently enough to be educational, not in the ways they needed to. So the whole trip required a climax, and I found it just a few miles up the road from our campsite in Cave City at Horse Cave. Horse Cave is the actual name of a town, and it’s two miles off I-65 and features a cave system that runs under the town called Hidden River Cave. I wasn’t sure what we were getting into, but it sounded promising. So on the last day of our visit, we arrived there in the pouring rain and had a fantastic little adventure.
Hidden River Cave was everything I had been looking for regarding a cave experience. It was privately owned, but the investment was better than what we had just seen at Mammoth Cave. They had almost a whole city block of cave tourism that was very well organized, complete with a fantastic museum. And it was all right in the middle of town. It is so well hidden that most people coming to the Mammoth Cave site have no idea it’s even there. But after visiting, I would say anybody going to Mammoth Cave should make Hidden River Cave part of their journey. It’s so good that really I would say it’s better than going to Mammoth Cave. It’s much easier to deal with as a visitor, and the cave interaction is much more adventurous. The cave tour itself takes visitors back into the system as it runs directly under the town of Horse Cave, around ¾ of a mile. It’s not a long tour, but just long enough to be interesting. My kids weren’t bored at all; the cave isn’t as well lit up as Mammoth Cave which is a big plus because it allows you to get your own flashlights out and use them to see. But the path you walk on is fantastic, exceptionally well built and features the longest underground suspension bridge in the world that spans across a deep underground gorge where the Hidden River rages by underneath. Because it’s a river, it floods often and did flood over after all the heavy rain just a few days after we left the area. That is why the trail is so good because it’s built to withstand flooding. So, there was nothing rickety and unsafe about it. But it didn’t feel too touristy either; it was an adventurous experience without being uncomfortable or hazardous for little ones.
Three hundred million years ago, the Mammoth Cave region was the coastline of an inland ocean. The equator was in a different place, to the north, so the sea did its work to carve out all these cave features by working through the sandstone layers and getting down into some of the intense limestone, which is why there are over 400 miles to the Mammoth Cave system, and all these exciting pockets of private cave tours like Hidden River Cave that are so conveniently off the highway. Visitors can get up close and personal with adventurous tours without getting dirty and spending an entire day going spelunking, which are options offered at Hidden River Cave. They had a whole adventure course with zip lines and canopy ropework behind the tourist entrance. This cave experience was created by adventurers for the purpose of exploration, and it had the right vibe I was hoping for. But what was missing was that stiffness you get at the National Parks. We have been to many of them, including Yellowstone, the Grand Tetons, and the Badlands, and while those places are very nice, they have a kind of government bureaucracy to them that was completely gone at Hidden River Cave. In the context of some of the best places in the world to go, Hidden River Cave is one of the best, and it’s so easy to get to. I would highly recommend it. It’s worth a trip by itself. As I said, the cave does flood, so it’s very adventury down in it. But when it rains heavily, it fills up after a few days. It’s not like people would be caught down there in a flash flood. It takes a few days to fill and a few days longer for all the water to run out. But the result of the cave itself is that it’s just wild enough to experience caves in an adventurous way, without the dangers of exploring caves that this level of interaction actually entails. The Hidden River Cave experience is a wonderful option showing how private ownership often gets the best results, which is undoubtedly the case here.
Rich Hoffman
The Overmanwarrior 