Descending into Kentucky’s Belly: Mammoth Caves Wild Cave Tour

I’m straddling a 3-foot wide canyon, 8 feet above the cave floor, and I’m stuck. I’m supposed to follow the footing of my “guardian angel,” but mine is a Siberian exchange student who moves like a gazelle. She is long gone, out of sight around a bend. I’m on my own for the next 20 feet with no choice but to plunge ahead.
Hours earlier I was milling around the Mammoth Caves National Park Visitors’ Center with a few hundred folks waiting for tours to depart. The Kentucky park is the longest-known continuous cave system in the world, with 400 miles of connected passages. At most national parks, visitors are free to explore on their own. This is impossible at Mammoth Caves. To see these sights, you must take one of many guided tours. They range in length and difficulty, from easy strolls along wide paths to the strenuous Wild Cave Tour, which is how I chose to spend a summer day.
The tour’s description on the park website is succinct. “Hand-and-knee crawling; belly crawls as tight as 9" through small cave passages off traditional walking tour routes. Visitors are required to perform several freehold climbs up or down ten-foot cave walls.”
People respond in one of two ways: “I’ve GOT to do this before I die!” or “No way. I’d rather die.”
If you’re up for the challenge, expect to spend 6 hours covering 5 miles of underground passages. Guides distribute helmets, headlamps, jumpsuits, gloves, and kneepads. You will wish you had elbow pads too.
As you navigate each passages, the guide demonstrates moves you can’t believe you have to emulate. And then, somehow, you do.
You inch, belly to the ground, through low tunnels that let out into huge caverns your headlamp barely illuminates. You hoist yourself into a dark hole above you. You canyon walk, wedged between walls high above the floor.
You hit your head. A lot.
You experience the total darkness and silence that can only happen deep within the Earth. It is so thick it will feel heavy, like a weight on your chest.
Hours later you squeeze out of a crack in the wall in front of a hundred visitors on one of those easy tours you snubbed, because you’re an adventurer. They stare in surprise and admiration. You imagine they’re a little jealous, and you like it that way. You are dirty, sweaty, scratched, bruised, tired, and happy.
The Wild Cave Tour isn’t for everyone, but the limited spots are in high demand among the willing. It runs on weekends only and the group size is just 14, so book ahead, especially in summer.