Cave Rooms

We entered the cave through the building by going through the basement and then down a set of stairs with a fallout shelter sign.  At the bottom of the stairs there were a few ramps and then we were in the first room of the cave, it was a pretty large room with some different deposits visible on the walls, including quartz crystals and thin layers of flint.

We then headed down a small ramp and saw the first running water in the cave, at this point we were roughly seventy feet underground, and nearly into the first main room of the cave – The Ballroom.  The Ballroom is the biggest room in the cave where many bats reside; we were able to see a few of them in hibernation.  On the ceiling of the Ballroom there were little streaked gouges that ran in all kinds of directions and are there from little prehistoric critters crawling around and leaving their imprints.

We left the Ballroom and then went through a little hallway filled with beautiful speleothems of many different varieties; including soda straws, small stalactites and rim stone.  Through this hallway we entered Mary’s Maze where there was another beautiful collection of more speleothems.  This room also contained a few different passage ways, one of which is the area that most of the cave’s bats enter through, neither of these passageways were more than a seventy centimeters in diameter.

Mary’s Maze led through some more prime examples of soda straws among other speleothems on our way to the Refrigerator Room.  The Refrigerator Room does not have as many of the interesting cave features as many of the other rooms; however it is the most stable room in the cave, temperature-wise, as it is always 48 degrees Fahrenheit. 

The next room on the tour was the Ghost and Goblin room, in which there were many crazy things naturally carved into the rock.  Some of the things displayed in the Ghost and Goblin room included shapes that resembled; Popeye, Frankenstein, a Cabbage Patch Kid, and of course, a ghost and a goblin.  The room itself was very small and we could all barely fit in it, but we did have a chance to see the neat carvings in the walls.
The Fossil room was the second to the last room that we were able to see on the tour, this room, as the name suggests has many different fossils in it and a small diagram showing the different species.  There were trilobite fossils as well as a few others in the room, most being very definitive and easy to see the exact lines of where the fossil was and the basic shape.

The last room we toured was filled with peoples “wishes,” everyone that comes into the room is told to leave some change wherever they can get it to stick into the cave wall.  There were a few bats in this room as well as well as a lot of loose change.  After seeing all the change and hearing the story of the change, there were a few examples of some luminescent minerals that glowed under a black light, basically just for fun, but it was quite interesting to see how different minerals glowed in different colors.