Ping Pong Balls of Fire

That next day was Easter Sunday. I got up and on the road earlier than my norm, because I was concerned about being the only camper. I guess I expected a bogeyman to show up and berate me for not paying the night before! As I drove out through the park, I didn’t encounter anyone. On the far end of town, I commiserated with the clerk at the gas station, having to work on Easter and all. She was taking it pretty well, but was bored with so few people coming in.

The remainder of the drive to my national park goal was often thickly lined with Redbuds, sometimes mixed with white blooms of Dogwood. I was soon in Kentucky, taking the Audubon Parkway to Owensboro and there hooking up with the William H. Natcher Parkway, both toll roads. As we pulled up to our first tollbooth, the woman working there pointed at The Dude and remarked to me “He ain’t spoiled is he?” I replied in the negative as my travel companion raised his head from his accustomed place on my right leg and looked at her hopefully, as if she might have a dog biscuit for him. “No, he ain’t at all!” she laughed, as she waved us on our way. Folks frequently admire The Dude. Later as we pulled up to another tollbooth, the woman exclaimed, “Oh, you’ve got a Schnauzer there! He’s awful quiet for a Schnauzer.” Being Easter, it was a slow day for traffic, so we had time to discuss his breed, his age (four) and his name before another car pulled up behind me.

Rather than take the parkway farther south to Bowling Green to use the interstate, I cut across State Highway 70, a smooth two-lane road with no shoulders that weaves around and about and up and down through farming and residential areas. Though slow, it was a great way to see the rolling countryside and observe the hot weather styles of houses--broad open porches on the front of almost all the homes. The steady rain that fell all day didn’t dampen my spirits.

Highway 70 becomes the West Entrance Road or the Brownsville Road, depending on which map you believe. This route into Mammoth Cave National Park wove through gentle, wooded hills leading to Mammoth Cave Parkway and finally the visitor center. As it was early afternoon, I checked out the center briefly. The building itself is quite small, holding a viewing area for movies, a well-stocked bookstore with some gift items, an information desk and the sales desks for tour tickets. I gathered up a map of the park, a park newspaper, and treated myself to a waterproof topographic map of the park. Before heading off to find the campground, I bought a ticket for the next day’s Frozen Niagara Tour of the caves.

After grabbing a campsite, I took a nap. I hadn’t slept well the night before at the empty-but-for-me campground. My idea of a vacation is to relax as much as possible. Relaxing is plenty interesting, and The Dude is almost as good at it as I am. The national park was still there when we woke up later and took a short walk in the woods behind the campsite.

The ground near the campground had recently been burned. Grasses and small bushy plants were blackened but nothing above two or three feet was burned. Few of the trunks of the larger trees were even blackened, much less burned. I assumed the park had done a controlled burn in the last few days. That assumption was confirmed later when someone on a tour asked about the blackened ground. The ranger told us that helicopters dropped tiny ping-pong ball sized bombs containing a chemical that burned hot and went out fast so just the brushy lower plants are removed. It doesn’t damage the established trees and it puts itself out at the roads and walkways where the wet green grass lining does not catch fire like the dry leaves covering the ground beneath the trees.

Those of us who grew up with dire warnings from Smokey the Bear know that for many years the park service tried to prevent all forest fires. It seemed like a no brainer that fires destroying forests we want for recreation or resources is a bad thing. While Smokey’s advice is still good for us tourists who enjoy campfires, the forest service now understands that not all forest fires are bad for the ecosystem.

A national forest website lists a number of reasons to do a controlled or “prescribed” burn. I suppose it should have been obvious that “opening scenic vistas” and removing unwanted vegetation were among the reasons. In some cases, they may want to encourage plants that depend on occasional fires to keep out competitors. Plants that need these conditions may also attract wildlife that depends on them for food and shelter. Setting the controlled fires can help foresters prevent wild fires and protect nearby human habitations by removing the most combustible fuel – grasses and smaller vegetation. It would never have occurred to me that fires are “improving percolation of rainfall to aquifer.” I suppose if an excess of plants is not soaking up the water, then the aquifers will?

Modern land managers didn’t invent prescribed burning. Native Americans had been using the technique for hundreds of years for pretty much the same reasons as the park service. I imagine they observed which plants and animals returned after natural fires, and realized that fire could be a useful tool to encourage species they depended on. Today’s managers have more weather data to use in deciding when conditions are good for controlling the burn, and a lot more paperwork before getting the OK from the higher ups. There are also a lot more people who might be affected that have to be notified. Not all controlled burns are started on purpose. Some areas of our national forests and parks are considered “Natural Fire Zones” where fires are monitored but allowed to burn with little or no intervention. Lightning is the primary cause of such fires.

Foresters discovered that fires had benefits as well as drawbacks. For instance in Zion National Park, the suppression of wild fires meant there was more fuel available when natural fires did start. Ponderosa Pines were in danger of being lost because of the extra fuel that could get a fire burning hot enough to ignite the big trees. Forests were creeping out and taking over grasslands that are useful to animal species that live there. The natural succession of vegetation was changing as well. Now the park service at Zion hopes to use prescribed burns to reduce fuel, reduce brush, thin dense conifers and rejuvenate aspen. Similar changes in fire control are happening throughout the park and forest services.

On a park tour, I mentioned to a ranger that I had seen some smoldering patches in the woods by the campground. He said that it was common for some small fires to burn for a few days. The two days of rain and snow that had been coming down lessened the danger of a fire getting out of control.

You wouldn’t expect it, but the near constant rains were really a bonus to my visit. A ranger on the Violet City Lantern Tour informed us that park staff couldn’t remember a time when they had seen so much water in the cataracts of the caves. That day, the water was gushing abundantly from a hole in the cave ceiling to a chasm below. Apparently there are times when very little to no water flows through such openings. A sandstone cap over the limestone caves prevents the caves from having much running water, at least in modern times for the higher caves. In places where water does enter, it creates the fancy mineral formations of stalagmites, stalactites, curtains and more. Rather than soaking into the ground like rain would in locations with deeper soil, it puddles on the sandstone just beneath the topsoil, running off slowly to the seasonal streams and into the sinkholes that are plentiful in the area. The rain that sculpts the caves falls outside the park beyond the limestone caps and travels underground to join the rivers at the lowest cave levels.

I spent five days at Mammoth Cave and could easily have spent several weeks exploring the above ground hiking trails and taking more cave tours. Not all tours are offered all year. Some of them are tailored to children and their parents or restricted by various levels of fitness. Tours are all limited to a certain number of visitors per trip, and even at this relatively slow time of year, the competition for space was tough. Some tours filled up so quickly, one had to sign up several days in advance or miss out. Planning ahead to get the tour you want wouldn’t be out of line at this park if you don’t plan to visit more than a day or two. I managed to get on three tours but procrastinated too long in deciding if I wanted to go on the Introduction to Caving Tour. The tour description sounded like fun to me –– “climbing and descending cave walls; tight belly crawls; walking in a crouched position; hand and knee crawls over rough rocks and dirt; crawling over damp trails; twisting in and out of passageway openings.” It could be my chance to experience caves like a real spelunker. When I couldn’t get a ticket, I detected a distinct taste of sour grapes, and told myself I was much too old at 50 to keep up with the other participants.

The Dude, of course, was not allowed to go on any of the cave tours. I doubt he would have liked the unusual environment. He stayed in the camper and probably cursed my name, imagining me taking fabulous walks without him. He couldn’t know how park rules got him some revenge on me for making him wait in the camper. As a dog, his presence is not allowed on trails in the national parks, so I missed out on many hikes. In places not necessarily as scenically exciting, we took walks every day where he was allowed.

I know some dog owners allow their canine friends to run loose or leave their waste on paths. It just doesn’t seem fair to me that those rude people should ruin it for the rest of us. Like many dog owners, I find travel difficult without my friend, The Dude. I need him! He is good company and some protection, as he is a great alarm system. Even if it was affordable, I couldn’t leave him bereft in a kennel for the 10 weeks that my trip took. He wouldn’t like it and I wouldn’t like being without him. A few of the national parks have courteously provided fee-based kennels tourists can use while on tours or hikes.

In mid-April it was still cool enough in Kentucky that I didn’t worry about The Dude getting too hot in the Toy House. If it was warm, I turned on the ventilation fan in the roof. It’s not like leaving him in a car. The Escaper is our house. I assume he sleeps a lot while I’m gone or barks at folks who pass by the camper. It’s his home away from home and I’m sure he guards it as such. After a tour one evening I was fixing dinner, and I saw his eyes drooping shut even as he sat in begging position. I figure he was exhausted from being on guard all afternoon and from worrying that this time I might not return. Or, maybe he was just bored waiting for me to figure out his request. I assume he is not barking too much while alone, as I have all the shades closed and a sunscreen blocking the cab windows. No one has complained or left nasty notes on the windshield.

We spent two nights in the main campground where I could take a shower, and three nights at the less developed campground next to Houchin’s Ferry. This little treasure of a campground is off the beaten path. You find it at the end of a road tucked behind the high school in Brownsville called the Houchin’s Ferry Road. (Technically it’s a well-beaten path, because it’s a paved road leading to an operating ferry.) The campground is next to the ferry. You can watch vehicles being carried across the Green River to the road on the other side.

One day I was hanging out at the campground, wondering what was on the other side of the river and could my small RV fit on the ferry? In the little house at the top of a hill that led down to the ferry, I asked the ranger on duty. I apologized for interrupting his TV watching, but he seemed happy to talk instead. He said that locals use the ferry road as a shortcut to a small community north of the park. I had seen a repair van go across and heard many folks calling out familiarly to the ranger when he came out of his building to drive them across the river. He figured I would be able to go across in my little RV.

The ferry driver had worked at other national parks over his 20 years of service. We had a pleasant discussion about how he liked running the ferry (pretty well) and about how much colder it gets in Minnesota than in Kentucky (lots). He said they rarely got much more than three inches of snow. However, in the last few years they have been closing the ferry for December, January and February when the roads get slippery on the steep hills of Houchin’s Ferry Road. I bet that bums out the locals. He spends those months helping out with maintenance of the caves and other park facilities.

After awhile, a ferry customer arrived, so The Dude and I headed off down a path. There were thousands of wild flowers in bloom – Trillium, Violets, Wild Geranium, Blue Phlox, May Apples, Creeping Charlie and others I didn’t recognize. These flowers are mostly quite tiny, not show boaters like Tulips and Rhododendron. Much of the ground off the paths was swamp-like with deep moss and puddles. My hiking boots kept my feet dry, but The Dude has no need for dry feet and always enjoys mucking about in shallow muddy water.

We must have picked up two plastic garbage bags of trash on that path when we first policed it, and another two bags around the campground and picnic area. I say “we” because The Dude eats any food he finds before I put it in my bag (though I discourage the behavior and fear he’ll poison himself one day). Also he is very good at finding abandoned balls. I imagine he thinks tennis balls are a natural product of the environment. He prizes oranges and apples as well, if they are not rotten. He will collect anything round that fits in his jaws, including the water-logged head of a stuffed rabbit. Thankfully it was not a real rabbit head.

Not everyone is proud of our national parks. People will throw their junk food wrappers, toilet paper and other garbage anywhere. Lightweight garbage blows away to the nearest plant that nabs it, then tries (unsuccessfully from an aesthetic standpoint) to become a permanent part of the landscape (successfully as it mushes itself into the mud and hides under plant life). Bright blue candy wrappers and bulky plastic bags don’t share colors with nature. At this time of year, before the plants have grown up and over some of it, trash sticks out like an open wound on the natural floor. Maybe I get obsessed about mess, but it is hard to spot a great rock or pick up a stick for The Dude without also spotting a pop tab or a twist tie or even a crappy diaper. At home, if the trash I spot is white, it might only be birch bark. Here, where there are no birches, I find it is definitely trash. Paper, melted wads of plastic, Styrofoam plates, and plastic silverware poke out of the vegetation. Just charming. There are not enough of us, but I always like to run into other folks who pick up litter.

I am impressed with the park service’s efforts to conserve resources and educate us tourists about conservation. At Mammoth Cave, they serve organic coffee in the park restaurant. A film shows endangered bats and some successful efforts at slowing their decline. The cave tours no longer allow people to wander at will, write their names on walls or throw fiery torches. At one time in the history of cave tours, guides entertained their charges by throwing lit torches into the higher reaches of caverns to illuminate the recesses. The park service website is a bonanza of information on all aspects of the parks, including environmental problems. Much of that info is also available in easy-to-read print pieces at visitor centers.

I suspect there are more ways the parks could conserve park resources and fossil fuel energy. It is time to power our parks, particularly the remote ones using oil-consuming generators, with photovoltaic (solar) and wind electric systems. Even at current prices for systems, they would pay for themselves in savings from hauling oil products in oil-consuming trucks and boats to run noisy generators in our “wilderness” areas. For many years I worked at a company that sold solar-powered systems to generate electricity and to make hot water for household use, so I know what the equipment costs and that it works.

I also know that the first step in supplying power to any place--home, business or park building--is to conserve energy, meaning USE LESS OF IT whether the power comes from coal fired plants or wind towers or photovoltaic panels. How many clocks do we really need? One on the coffee maker, the range, the fridge, the microwave, the TV, the VCR, the DVD player and several plain old clocks? Need I go on with lectures about turning things off or using more muscle power? No. I don’t think so. There. Aren’t you relieved?

Our park system does seem to be working on the conservation end by using florescent lights, designing buildings to use less energy and putting in systems that turn lights or water off when not in use. More of this kind of thinking will help our park systems survive the growing energy crunch problems.

Two plaques outside the visitor center caught my attention. Put up in 1981, one says that Mammoth Cave has been “designated a World Heritage Site and joins a select list of protected areas around the world whose outstanding natural and cultural resources form the common inheritance of all mankind.” The other from 1990 dedicated the park as a Biosphere Reserve, “part of the international network of protected samples of the world’s major ecosystem types.” The statement dedicated the park “to conservation of nature and scientific research in the service of man” further saying that “it provides a standard against which the effect of man’s impact on his environment can be measured.” Nicely put. I hope the designation helps people understand the importance of our parks. Somebody besides me must read these things!

Preserving a natural area while allowing thousands of people to experience it every day is easier said than done. Even something as simple as electric lights can affect the cave life forms. Rangers showed us spots where the electric lights constantly illuminated rock formations, causing growth of green algae or moss. The park shuts the lights off at night and between tours to try to mitigate that problem. Even in passages where there were lights, they were kept to a minimum. On all the tours, the ranger at the head of the line turned on lights as we approached an area, while the ranger at the end shut off lights as we left. The guides said if the passages were lit better, tourists would find and steal artifacts. I don’t doubt it would happen if littering habits are any indication of tourist morality. I can’t say I wouldn’t be tempted to grab a little fossil if it was sitting there! Bad tourist!

For as many as 4000 years, humans have been making an impact on the caves and vice versa. Archeologists have found abandoned torches and footwear, indicating that prehistoric peoples explored at least 10 miles of the caves. One unfortunate man was trapped there for centuries, until a park worker exploring a ledge in 1935 found him crushed beneath a large boulder with only skull and shoulders visible. Carbon tests of the body suggest he died about 2000 years ago. Apparently Lost John, as he came to be called, was a miner of mineral salts and crystals. Perhaps he dislodged a support stone, bringing the large slab of rock down on top of him. Did any one come to find him? Was he a careless fellow who went into the passageways so far that the others were unable or too afraid to find him? Was he an ambitious miner who went in alone to find the minerals? Or was there foul play at work when an enemy gave the slab a helpful whack? One thing’s certain. Mistakes were made.

Scary Stories of Mammoth Cave by Ranger Charles Hanion and Colleen O’Connor Olson relates some of the lore that has sprung up about the caverns over the years. I was lucky enough to hear some of the stories dramatically retold by Ranger Hanion on the Violet City Lantern Tour. He entertained us with tales of Lost John and the misadventures of saltpeter miners. The tour was conducted in lantern light through most of the areas we saw. Of the 60 or so participants, about a third of us carried lanterns. I was surprised by how much light the lanterns gave, plenty to light the path and dimly illuminate the walls and ceilings of the passages. Lantern light created a more romantic and adventurous ambiance than the bright electric illumination on other tours. Some might call the wavering lantern light spooky, but with 50 tourists and a couple of park guides, I couldn’t conjure up that sentiment.

We must have been seeing and experiencing the caves much like the early American settlers, albeit with a point of view changed after 150 some years, and with better paths and stairways. Like the original inhabitants of the area, newcomers found the caves both fascinating and useful. In the 1800s, white people thought of many ways to exploit the caverns. In 1842, a section was used as a tuberculosis sanitarium. Ruins of some of the stone shelters built for the patients remain to remind visitors of that folly. Patients actually came to live in the dank little rooms. Some of them didn’t survive the damp, dreary experience. An entrepreneur of the late 1800s proposed building a “health resort” in a large cavern, but was never able to begin that enterprise. Thank heaven for that! An unfortunate common low in cave history was when slaves guided tours. Mining saltpeter for the War of 1812 was surely a task anyone could enjoy in close quarters – close to the wall, close to each other, and even the air was close. How kind to allow slaves that beneficial work as well.

As Hanion pointed out, all this activity has taken a toll on the caves. Easily found evidence of human ignorance is the nineteenth century graffiti on the walls of passageways and caverns, though it is certainly interesting as history. It was almost all created with the smoke from lanterns and candles, some of it in quite nice lettering, considering that handicap. The picturesque graffiti dated in the 1800s boasts the names of people who have been dead for a while now. None of those nineteenth century writers seem to have used the “forbidden words” of today’s spray-painting vandals. Our pioneers preferred names, dates, and occasional inscriptions like “To Nick the Guide.” Wall writing of any kind is of course forbidden now in the caves. Paint and smoke destroy the surface of the otherwise ever-forming minerals. Tiny crustaceans and crickets live in those caverns that have not been trashed. Yes, I mean literally trashed. Settlers used the caves as dumps for any and all kinds of waste, eventually destroying their own drinking water in the process. Caves large enough to be tourist attractions escaped some of that treatment, and some have been cleaned up enough so life has returned. For me, it was an eye opening illustration of how what we throw away does not really go away. A pity really. It’s so easy to toss and forget rather than reuse or recycle, especially easier than not creating the trash to begin with. We all feel that way, or we wouldn’t be in the messes we are in.

The death of natural formations is sad evidence of all us people running around, touching and grabbing, poking and prodding, breaking and taking. When we touch a growing stalagmite, our hands deposit oils that smother the surface. So advised, most tourists keep their hands off the walls as best they can. It was not always easy, as we shuffled down odd shaped tunnels, carved by water long before people were a gleam in the eye of biology. Before there was anything humans would call biology. Just things happening that now we call geology.

So far explorers have surveyed more than 350 miles of passages in the Mammoth Cave system. In another life, I would be a spelunker. I’d be younger and stronger and maybe even braver, too. Caves are magnificent oddities. Even small caves still hold some of the mystique I felt as a child visiting Crystal Cave in southern Wisconsin. Walking down and down, step after step, deep into the ground, until you are so far that the opening you came in looks like a quite small dot of light. And when you are far enough into the cave where no light from outside reaches it, they turn off the electric lights and it is darkest dark. That’s as close to zero optical input that I ever hope to get. Give me back my sight! The whole crowd breathes a sigh of relief when the lights go back on.

Visiting Mammoth Caves in 2004 and Carlsbad Caverns the year earlier checked off two items on my tourism life list. Mammoth has the longest tunnels and Carlsbad has the biggest caverns and now I have walked the trails in both. Carlsbad has more stupendous formations in my opinion, and the main cavern open to the public there is taller than any in Mammoth. Both have snack bars in a deep cavern. “Have lunch at the bottom of the earth!” Stand in line for millennia with one hundred and twenty other tourists, so you can eat a ham sandwich in the down deep.

Yes, eating in a cave below tons of rock has its appeal. That’s obvious from the line. But my favorite part of cave tours is staring in awe at the damp curtain folds in the walls, the giant stalagmites and -tites, and the tiny ones, and the dark deep holes falling into the distance, like scenes from Sinbad’s adventures or The Lord of The Rings. Imagine gallons and gallons and gallons of water flowing through miles of tunnels and caverns, smoothing them wider by miniscule grains of rock, removing this mineral, leaving that harder one, sculpting forms that drive our imaginations.

I find it as difficult to leave the subject of Mammoth Cave, as it was to conclude the visit itself. To take on the ambitiously long route I had planned, I needed to move on once in awhile. A time constraint did exist. I planned to meet Tom at a friend’s New Mexico home in mid-June. Other hopes included checking out some of the state parks along the way, as well as some of the monuments and historic sites in the federal park system. And The Dude had many new smells yet to discover at each. So many places. So little time.