United States Mammoth Cave National Park

“this was the first national park i ever visited (and really my first solo trip anywhere). went in early december a couple years ago and stayed in the area for 4 days. all the tours i did had maybe 9-10 other people max. saw bats in the caves and cave crickets (ik people probably think they’re icky i was excited though lol). the trails above the caves were so gorgeous - deer EVERYWHERE, so many songbirds, mushrooms and mosses in every color / shade of green imaginable, putty root orchids, ferns, and the last of the oak trees still hanging onto their dead leaves. it was so quiet here aside from the sound of the birds and rain hitting the leaves on the ground.”

“I was fortunate enough to win the lottery for the Floyd Collins History Tour at Mammoth Cave National Park. It was a special tour they offered in honor of the 100 year anniversary of Floyd getting trapped and tragically dying in Sand Cave during February of 1925. This series of tours was the first time the park had offered a public tour in Crystal Cave since it became part of Mammoth Cave NP in 1961; we visited Sand Cave (not pictured but publicly accessible in the park) and Crystal Cave, where we followed along the same tour path that Collins would have taken his guests in the 1920's. There's no lighting in the cave, so we used headlamps which hopefully explains why my photos aren't stellar (definitely not my camera skills).”

“On Saturday, we did two tours: the Grand Avenue Tour in the morning and the Historic Tour in the afternoon. On Sunday, we did the Gothic Avenue Tour in the AM before hitting the road. Since it wasn’t their summer season, the tour options were limited, and we also wanted to fit in as much “cave time” as we could given our brief visit. I think these three worked out pretty well on both fronts. It was a lot of cave, but these three didn’t overlap much and we had different tour guides on each. You can’t really see much of Mammoth Cave unless you’re on a ranger-led tour (unlike, say, Carlsbad Caverns); there is a self-guided tour, but it’s pretty minimal. Even in the off season, when we went, the tours booked up. I’m a planner, so we had ours reserved a few months in advance, abut we overheard a few folks talking about how they had come to see the caves, but there weren’t any tours available.”