![]() Virginia’s limestone caves are strange, fragile places shaped by violent cataclysms and the drip and flow of water over millions of years. Forget “Second Life,” “Minecraft,” and other virtual destinations. A show cave, unlike a wild cave, lets people with no technical skills or specialized equipment experience the world beneath our world, a frontier comparable to oceans or outer space. ![]() I’m here because geology fascinates me and because show caves-some of America’s earliest tourist destinations-are struggling to find their place in the modern world. Eliot, who has been looking forward to this family field trip ever since studying Valley and Ridge topography in her Virginia history class, can hardly get a word in edgewise.Įndless Caverns is the first stop on our three-day tour of the Shenandoah Valley’s historic limestone attractions. We press on, our voices pinging off cave walls, cool, earthy-smelling air filling my nose.Įntering this strange realm is exhilarating enough to penetrate the shell of my moody teenager, who peppers our tour guide with question after question. Bulbs tucked behind stalagmites flicker on, throwing shadows across a jagged ceiling. We descend stone steps, reaching a point where the manmade tunnel ends and a corridor of natural limestone dives deep into the mountain-the threshold between the blip of human history and the oblivion of geology. This was originally the cavern exit, where those 3,000 visitors in 1924 ended their underground tour. Kait Van Zandt, a recent James Madison University graduate and fanatical caver (“spelunker,” it turns out, is an amateur word), leads us through an iron door into a dimly lit vault of hand-dressed limestone blocks that could have been conjured by Edgar Allan Poe himself. ![]() ![]() Ten minutes later, we’re following a young woman with a headlamp draped around her neck into the basement. Trailed by my 10-year-old daughter, Eliot, and my son Luther, 14, I enter and find a middle-aged man behind a glass counter filled with pyrite, quartz crystals, geodes, and Native American arrowheads. The entrance cottage is closed, but a larger limestone building is open for business. Similarly beckoned, I roll up to Endless Caverns on a warm November Sunday 89 years later. ![]()
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