Cumberland Caverns

08/21/2024

Our OVERNIGHT ADVENTURE packages are perfect for groups looking to build some self-confidence and team work skills in their members! We have four different overnight adventure packages for a variety of experience levels and age groups, starting at just 6 year old!

08/18/2024

We CAVE CREW members know how to have fun. After a hike over the 350 natural stone steps on the Hall of the Mountain King, it's time to WOBBLE!

Markie, our merch manager, keeps things lively around here ;)

08/16/2024

NOVEMBER will be the time to run all over Cardwell Mountain! Let's see what kind of endurance our runners have navigating the fun karstic terrain of Cardwell Mountain. :) SEE YOU ALL THERE!
Mad Cow Running Company & Outfitters, LLC Custom Cow Race Series

08/16/2024

Did you know we offer PRIVATE walking tours? It's called the Hidden Gems Private Tour, and with a little planning your walking tour can be just you and yours! It gives your family or group the opportunity to move at your own pace and ask the guide about the things you are most interested. For two hours you get your own private tour guide ;)

It must be booked at least 10 days in advance and is limited in availability. BOOK ONLINE TODAY!

08/14/2024

We are the LARGEST cave in the state of TENNESSEE open to the public!

We have a long history of cave exploration and we have a tour for almost everyone! From walking tours to adventure tours, overnight packages to events under our iconic chandelier, Cumberland Caverns is the ultimate cave experience.

08/04/2024

The Higgenbotham's Hollow is a GREAT way to experience real caving, and Vera really knows what she is doing. What's even more awe-inspiring?! In the middle of crawling through the birth canal you realize people used to do this in the 1800s in period attire. People were just built different back then!

07/30/2024

If you haven't been here in a minute, we have something new hot off the presses. Impossible to capture, can only be experienced in person. The entire room comes alive around you with video projected on the cave formations and walls, surround sound and updated lights. Time to come back for a visit!

07/29/2024

Our Cardwell Mountain History Tour is great if you are short on time, don't want to hike all those stairs, or are just a history buff looking to learn a bit more in-depth history about our cave and caving history in general.

This tour is offered daily, 7 days a week! Head to our website to book your next cave tour ;)

07/27/2024

Throwback to when our cave was already becoming famous.

We opened as a show cave in 1956, and have continued the tradition of adventure and wonder that pulled in adventurers as early as 1810.

Higginbotham Cave and Henshaw Cave were heavily visted long before we opened in 1956 but the discoveries werent over. In the 70s significant exploration by cavers led us to expand our understanding of how large the Cumberland Caverns system is. Over 27 miles of cave, the LARGEST show cave in Tennesee.

07/22/2024

Whether you've been here many times or never been here before, you are in for something NEW and EXCITING here at Cumberland Caverns! Check our our brand new Cinematic Showcase on our Discovery and Hidden Gems walking tours! Great for the whole family, we have truly brought the story of the exploration and discovery of Cumberland Caverns to life with video, audio and lights. It's an experience that can be replicated no where else.

07/19/2024

Update July 19 at 4:10 pm: Our website should be back up and running! Thank you, everyone, for your patience.

Our website is down. Please be patient as we wait for these technical issues to be resolved.

Until our website is restored tickets will be sold in person. Please arrive at least 30 min prior to the tour time you would like to join to allow us time to get you added to a tour.

06/18/2024

Thank you to the Southern Standard Newspaper for writing about our new experience we are about to open!

A gratifying part of writing Business Pulse is hearing about and covering a major business project in the planning stages and covering it through to completion. This week I get to complete the circle of covering the new Coffee Bank & Trust building.

06/18/2024

It's been HOT out there.

That's ok, we have the "INDOOR-OUTDOORS" cooled down for you.

Our cave is naturally 56 degrees all year round, which feels great on hot Summer days.

06/16/2024

HAPPY FATHER'S DAY!

Dad has been there through thick and thin, and beginning from that first bicycle ride with training wheels, he's been showing you how to have fun and seek adventure.

Today it's YOUR TURN to get Dad out of the routine and explore. Escape the heat of the surface, drag him off that mower, and come on out for a cave tour. It's 56 degrees in our cave naturally, the best way to beat the heat AND enjoy the great outdoors all in one go.

06/11/2024

06/07/2024

DEEP THOUGHTS (while deep in a cave):

A cave is technically nothing.

It is a spectacularly amazing, beautiful nothing... but that's what a cave is. EMPTY SPACE.

It is filled with amazing speleothems, and the process of cave formation leads to the unique exposure of fossils and geologist structures buried in ocean sediments from a time so far removed from today the human mind can hardly process it.

06/06/2024

Happy National Caves & Karst Day - June 6, 2024

06/05/2024

June 6th is National Caves and Karst Day and we are celebrating with a chat with the General Manager of Cumerland Caverns, Nicole Ridlen!

If you have ever had an interest in Caves, this interview is the one for you!

Cumberland Caverns offer four walking tour options which range from easy to mildly strenuous. These are appropriate for the whole family and are very educational AND entertaining. Then for those that are wanting a bit more adventure they also offer four different adventure tours from moderate to extreme in difficulty, as well as overnight packages for groups like scouts, schools or other organizations.

You can watch on YouTube at Meisterkhan Pod. https://youtu.be/kM_SVg50km4

You can listen at Meisterkhan.com or on your favorite podcasting app. http://sites.libsyn.com/153731/too-opinionated-interview-nicole-ridlen

Reaching fans in 88 countries, Too Opinionated is your next obsession!

06/02/2024

How fast does a cave deposit “grow”?
There is no simple answer to this. Nature happens on it’s own timeline, which is often more periodic than predictable.

The amount of time it takes a speleothem to grow varies not only with regional climate, but also varies through time and space within a cave.

A soda straw in a dry, arid region, for example, might grow more slowly than a soda straw in a cave in a humid region. There are simply more drops of water to precipitate minerals.

Then there is the problem of geologic time: the area that is wet today could have been dry several thousand years ago. This means the climate is NOT constant over the lifespan of that speleothem.

Then the difference in space: in the exact same cave you can have one soda straw grow one inch in just 40 years while a
soda straw just a few feet away could take 140 years to grow the same length. The conduit where water travels to reach one soda straw may be more direct and constant, while the other only gets water during extreme rain events causing overflow.

Then we have to consider the chemistry of the water and how much mineral it can hold. The CO2 levels in the cave and the ability of the solution to degas is what allows the mineral to precipitate instead of staying in solution.

Some speleothems seem to grow at fairly constant rates, others can be sporadic, growing several inches over the course of 100 years, and then not growing at all for a couple hundred years, only to grow a whole inch the following 100 years. The only true way to know the age of a speleothem is to do radiometric age dating, using decay series like U/Th.

The short answer? IT’S COMPLICATED!

Of course that's not what most people want to hear, so most show caves are going to give you an average. You might hear "It takes approximately 100 years to grow 1"". Many show caves have been open for many decades, centuries even, and they will give you the average growth rate based on observed changes in speleothems in areas where human infrastructure makes measurement easy. In example: Some show caves have enlarged passageways so tour guests can see the cave more easily, and they can measure how long the soda straw is compared to how long it was since that tunnel was created.

So, they aren't lying to you...they are just giving the only available data they have. Not only would it be expensive to test the age of all the speleothems in a cave, but it is also a destructive sampling process. Even determining the age of one soda straw in a cave wouldn't tell you the growth rate of all soda straws.

If you want to learn more about speleothems I highly recommend the book Cave Minerals of the World by Hill & Forti. Specifically I would turn to page 285 to read about Speleothem Growth Rates. You can buy this book from the National Speleological Society bookstore.

05/30/2024

How many of you have been here in our cave? Who can give us the name of this room in the cave? :)

Can you believe it's already Summer? If you need to beat the heat while still getting a hike in, be sure to check out our Discovery tour.
Are the 350 stairs a little too daunting for you? The Cardwell is here to save the day. Both walking tours are available 7 days a week!

05/27/2024

As we enjoy this Memorial Day with family and friends, let's not forget what the holiday is all about. Keep the memories of those who paid the ultimate sacrifice close to heart today. They are the reason we are able to spend quality time with the ones we love in this beautiful country.

We are open today for tours, come on out. We have THREE walking tour options today: The Discovery, Cardwell and Lantern and TWO Adventure tours today with space still available: Higgenbotham and Hall Crawl. Rain or Shine, it is always cave time.

05/26/2024

The more you know! Our cave is millions of years old and has survived many earthquakes.
You will see some formations on our tour that were damaged naturally. In fact, that column on the left is part of our Cathedral formation, and was a break caused by local, natural changes in the cave environment LONG before any humans visited.
Since Cumberland Caverns was heavily visited prior to our opening in 1956 we also have some historic damage you might see along our tour route. You can learn all about this on our Cardwell Mountain History tour, and how we work hard today to protect and conserve the cave for future generations today. Now that we, as a society, know better, we strive to educate the world to DO better.

Now that we know better, we do better!

So you are visiting a cave in the middle of the U.S. and see a HUGE crack across a column. Surely that had to be from the great NEW MADRID earthquake, right? HOLD THAT THOUGHT!

It's a pretty common assumption to make, but chances are you could be wrong! Speleothems often snap due to other, local changes that have nothing to do with seismic events.

The column in this photo (left) has snap in it that was the result of erosion/shrinkage of clay that was beneath it. Stalagmites and columns don't form in mid-air, they build up on top of substrate: Dirt, breakdown piles, clay. Those materials can settle over time, and clay shrinks when it isn't saturated with water. Other times water moving through the cave can remove the rocks/dirt beneath flowstone/columns (See column on right, which is undercut under the flowstone around it). When this happens, the bottom of the column or flowstone can be VERY heavy, and it can't support it's own weight- it snaps!

Another very common breakage in caves is due to vandalism. 100 years ago (which isn't that long ago in the grand scheme of things, geologically speaking) it was quite common for cave visitors to break speleothems. Some did it to take home a souvenir piece, others did it simply because they thought it was fun. In fact, that middle stalagmite in two pieces? It was broken by bat-yielding scouts who were left unattended in a cave and thought it would be fun. These days this practice is not only taboo, but is illegal in most cases... but history still haunts many caves today.

In fact, most of our show caves have been through MANY earthquakes and you would have never known. They are millions of years old. There have even been cases of cavers being underground during an earthquake and having no idea it even occurred. The way seismic waves (P-waves, S-waves, etc) move through unconsolidated sediment at the surface and solid bedrock beneath can be quite different.

This isn't to say speleothems are NOT broken by earthquakes- they very much can be! It's just not accurate to claim the breakage is from an earthquake when no studies have been done on that specific speleothem. It does have to be a specific event that hits the cave just right, though. Those speleothems that are damaged by earthquakes can provide geologists with useful data to define the epicenter and magnitude of earthquakes. Speleothems often record earthquakes and seismic movement through tilting as well. The seismic event can cause a stalagmite to tilt, and then any new growth on top is recorded at a new angle instead of straight up.

If you want to learn more about speleothems I highly recommend the book Cave Minerals of the World by Hill & Forti. Specifically I would turn to page 284 to read Paolo Forti's narrative about the Speleothems and Earthquakes, where you can learn more about what research scientists can learn from speleothems when they are confirmed through statistical age dating to tie them to seismic events. You can buy this book from the National Speleological Society bookstore.

05/25/2024

Our new email newsletter hit our subscriber inboxes earlier this week! If you didn't get a chance to read it, check it out here! Make sure [email protected] and [email protected] are added to your contact list to stay up to date on all goings on here atop Cardwell Mountain! Big things are in store here soon and you don't want to miss out!

05/24/2024

A New Wonder Awaits at Cumberland Caverns!

Get ready to experience the caves like never before. Stay tuned for an unforgettable journey beneath the surface. Are you ready for the unexpected?

05/23/2024

05/21/2024

05/14/2024

We are back to normal operating hours. Hope to see you soon!

05/13/2024

Great news! They are out here digging out the broken/slumping/undercut asphalt and putting in some crusher run so we can open back up tomorrow! 🤩 Tuesday May 14, 2024 returning to normal operating hours.

Thank you to the roads crew!!!

05/12/2024

We are surprised this needs to be said...but if there is a big barrier that says "Road Closed" it means the road is closed. It is not an invitation to drive around it.

We've had vehicles driving around this sign. Some have bottomed out on the broken asphalt on the damaged bridge.

Out of respect for the hard working Warren County roads dept, we need to give them time and space to fix the bridge. We are also doing work up here at the cave so we can reopen as soon as the bridge is repaired. Please, please be considerate of us down here at the dead end. We don't need all the looky loos, and yes, we are closed up here at Cumberland Caverns. We really don't need a car stuck, or further damage to, the already damaged bridge.