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Americas Best Value Inn
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The Americas Best Value Inn of Bowling Green, is centrally located between Louisville, KY, and...
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United States: Nature & Wildlife
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Mammoth Cave National Park
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Mammoth Cave National Park is a U.S. National Park in central Kentucky, encompassing portions of Mammoth Cave, the most extensive cave system known in the world. The official name of the system is the Mammoth Cave System, though it could be argued that it should be called the Flint-Mammoth-Toohey-Eudora-Joppa-Jim Lee Ridge Cave System—to account for the ridges under which the cave has formed. The park was established as a national park on July 1, 1941. The park's 52,830 acres (214 km²) are located 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.
Mammoth Cave is 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 360 miles (579 kilometers) of passageway; new discoveries and connections add several miles to this figure each year.
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.
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