Waaaaay back in The Olden Days, around the year 200,000,004 BC, there was a bunch of limestone. There was also a river. The river wanted to get from its start to its end as quickly as possible, because that tends to be the way of rivers. And so the river decided that the best way to accomplish its goal was to burrow its way through the limestone. In the process of doing so, the river managed to create a rather large series of caverns.
A little later on, back in The Less Olden Times, the local Native Americans discovered the opening into the caverns. The opening consisted of a hole in the ground about the size of the average pizza box (not that they are likely to have used that comparison themselves) that opened into a 200-foot drop straight down through a wide cave with absolutely no footholds or handholds, where you could see nothing but the occasional bat swooping around in the darkness and hear the occasional drip of water. Being human beings, they of course had to go in and poke at things.
They devised a series of ropes and logs and teleporter beams and whatnot that enabled them to reach the bottom with a fair margin of safety (though the remains of nineteen splattered native people at the bottom of the cavern indicates that it wasn't a sure thing). Exploring around, they found all manner of spiffy things. Chert protrusions, from which they could easily shape high-quality arrowheads. Gooey stuff on the walls, that was great for making body paint with (and which is still used by the world's cosmetic industry even today). Stalactites and stalagmites, that they would break off and wander around with to show off to people. A spring that produced about as pure a source of water as you could find in Nature. And a river flowing off into the darkness. Going upstream was a bit of a problem, since it would require being underwater for a significant amount of time. Going downstream was possible, however, and the natives found that the river exited through another opening about a mile and a half downstream.
The natives didn't really bother much with the cave most of the time, only making the occasional foray into it for chert and goo. Then the European settlers arrived, and the natives basically said, “Well, there goes the neighbourhood!” and tended to avoid the area. Until the 1770's, that is.
During the American Revolutionary War (aka “The War We Couldn't Really Be Bothered With And So Let The Colonials Win”), the British were a bit occupied elsewhere in the world and so couldn't really afford to have a proper number of British troops running around doing things. To help offset this lack, they enlisted a lot of the Native Americans to go out and burn crops or steal chickens or go cow-tipping or otherwise annoy those revolting rebels.
So when the native raiders came to the region of Bridgeplace, they remembered the caves. And they came up with a cunning plan. What they would do is to stage a quick raid on a farm or a small village, and then run away. But they wouldn't run too fast, because they wanted the militia and the angry farmers with guns to be able to follow them. The raiders would descend down the little hole into the caves, and the militia would say, “Ah ha! Forsooth, we have captured yon Rascals in yonder dank Hole! Let us make Camp here, and await their inevitable Re-emergence!” The militia would then sit around the hole in the ground, watching for the raiders to stick their heads out.
The raiders, meanwhile, would go down the underground river and sneak out through the secret opening there, whereupon they would go back to the farm or settlement and make a nice leisurely raid on it while all of its defenders were away.
It seems that they were able to pull this trick numerous times. Apparently the settlers had less of a “learning curve”, and more of a “learning horizontal line”.
Eventually things went downhill for all the native tribes in the region, and they were all relocated to the Midwest. The European settlers didn't really care about the mysterious hole in the ground and didn't poke around in it, and so the caverns were mostly forgotten about.
Then in the 1860's, a local farmer was digging a root-cellar about fifty yards south of the old cave entrance, which by then was lost amongst the bushes and brambles. The farmer got a bit of a surprise when at one point he stuck his shovel into the ground and the shovel just kept going. Investigating around a bit in the hole, he discovered that he'd broken through the roof of a massive underground chamber. And this time, there was a nice easy way to get down into the cave without having to depend on ropes and frantic scrambling.
And the farmer thought to himself, “Well, digging this root-cellar went a lot faster than I thought it would!”, and he then proceeded to drag all of his roots down there for storage. And all of his neighbours' roots for storage, too, for a small fee. There was probably enough space down there to store the entire state's root supply, and the climate down in his new root-cellar remained at a constant low temperature (about 60°F) all day and all night, all year.
For the next eighty years, the caves served as the farm's root-cellar without much other ado. In the 1920's somebody put in some pipes to bring the water up from the cave's spring and to the house above, but that was about it. Nobody really looked around down there, or took much notice of what was down there unless it involved the storage of root crops.
In the late 1940's, the land finally changed hands. And with the land went the root-cellar under the land. The new owner envisioned a bit more than simply storing turnips, however. He decided that the best thing to do was to open the caves up for the public. Which is exactly what he did. He installed stairs and electric lighting where needed, built a rather silly looking visitor's center, and then waited for the tourists to show up. Which they did.
And not just tourists, either. One of the local mayors decided to hold all official town meetings in one of the bigger rooms in the cavern. For one thing, it was nice and cool down there. Also, the acoustics were excellent. And best of all, it made it easier to kick out people whom he grew annoyed with.
Today there are no more town meetings down there, but there are still a large number of tourists who venture down to brave the perils of the bats and the dreaded cave crickets.
This is the Visitor's Center in all its 1950's glory, complete with wonderfully awful fake stone and log walls:
Here is how things look above the caves:
There are lots of rocks sticking up through the soil:
There is also a little sluice system there for herds of tourist children (or childish adults) to use in searching through mud for various treasures:
While the sea may have the sea-urchin, here in the mountains we have the less known but the far more dangerous mountain-urchin. No relation to the mountain oyster.
The original cave opening:
The root-cellar opening, and Stalwart Tourguide Guy:
Stalwart Tourguide Guy was an interesting fellow. Quite nice and friendly, though he'd obviously gone through his whole spiel at least a jillion times and is a bit bored by it. You could tell when he was repeating his memorised bits and when he was actually conversing, because during the bits he was reciting he would pronounce each and every syllable as a separate word. And sometimes each syllable as two separate words, which is a neat trick.
And then we went into the caves and looked around. A lot of the photos from inside are a bit grainy or blurry; this is because, even with all of the electric lighting inside, it was still rather dark in there. And since I didn't want to use the camera flash and traumatise our little batty friends (who were lurking everywhere in the shadows), I had to use a long shutter time.
This formation is called The Wedding Cake. In part because it looks vaguely like a wedding cake, but mainly because there have been at least fourteen weddings held beside it:
Right next to it is Lovers' Leap. The tradition is that a loving couple is supposed to hold hands and leap off the uppermost ledge. If they really do love each other, then they'll safely land on the floor of the cavern about sixty feet below (yeah). If one or both of them doesn't really love the other, however, then they'll smash into a second ledge that's about halfway down and be splattered all over the place. I'm not aware of anybody who has ever put this to the test, though.
More cave stuff. To put things a bit in scale, keep in mind that the roofs of many of these caverns are about 100 to 180 feet high.
Aaaaaaaaaaa! Giant jellyfish!
And last but not least: cave bacon!
In the end, despite the easy availability of bacon and of giant crayfish and of crickets that I could potentially train to be my minions, I decided not to establish my Batcave there. The bats had already done so, and thus it would be too redundant. And so I went home.
