Labor Day Weekend in Chattanooga: We Went to Ruby Falls

 

There were SO many caves that I'd wanted to see in Kentucky and Tennessee, but the timing didn't work out for most of them. In particular, my much-longed-for Crystal Cave tour doesn't actually exist, alas, although I have hiked to the Floyd Collins Homestead, at least. Dunbar Cave, where I REALLY wanted to see Mississippian indigenous peoples' cave art, moved their tours to just weekends the very week we visited, argh. 

But Ruby Falls, inside Lookout Mountain in Chattanooga, was perfect for a late-evening tour after a long day playing pinball. I mean, why NOT go see a cave at night? It's going to be dark in there anyway!

The tour guide's explanation of how Ruby Falls was discovered was a little hard to follow (later, Matt and I were all, "The guy was excavating for a railroad, right?"), but this little podcast episode is short and precise:

And now I really want to see the original Lookout Mountain Cave! It's bonkers that it's completely inaccessible.

This cave tour wasn't the most educational I've ever been on, but it WAS super accessible, and our tour group had a wide range of ages represented. The tour guide was more fun and bantering than I, personally, prefer (I prefer a tour guide who recites a lot of facts and then lets me ask them a lot of questions and answers me with a lot more facts), but everyone else seemed to enjoy it, so I'm pretty sure the same type of self-reflection is required as when you find yourself continually surrounded by assholes.

(It's you. You're the asshole.)

We had a pretty large group walking down these long and narrow cave passages, and so to my horror, the tour guide introduced a call-and-response for the last people in the group, who THANK GAWD were not me and Matt, but a young couple just behind us. Every now and then, he would call out, "Tick, tick!" and the couple had to then respond, "BOOM!!!" To their credit, they all seemed really into it. It just made me not want to exist in this particular universe, is all.

HOWEVER, the cave passages WERE all rather long and winding, and various parts of the group would often pause to take photos or admire something, which would get parts of the group backed up, and then someone else would also want a photo so then those parts would get backed up further, etc. It was all well and good when it was a single passage, but at one point I came upon two identical cave passages in front of me, one straight ahead, one curved to the left. 

Which way had the rest of the group gone? Hmm, no way to tell. 

Should I choose one at random? Probably not, but think what an adventure!

Just then, heard very faintly from far ahead, came a distant "Tick, tick!" We still couldn't tell which passage it had come from, so the couple withheld their boom until the tour guide came back and fetched us.

The next time there was dilly-dallying, another visitor in our group was stationed at a confusing junction to wave us the correct way...

I really liked the informational signage that accompanied some of the cave formations, so we'd know what we were looking at--

--or just to tell us the names of the most famous formations:

The mood lighting was maybe a little cheezy, but I liked it, too:

It was a fun change of pace from the typical yellow lighting inside a tour cave.

Our tour was essentially an out-and-back trek to the titular waterfall:

Again, there was a little bit of a cheeze factor with a prerecorded light and sound show, but I thought we had plenty of time to gaze in admiration at the waterfall and discuss amongst ourselves its formation and the watershed that flows into it.

By the time our cave tour ended, everything else on-site was closed, but we could still walk up the stairs to see the original castle-like tower that Leo Lambert had built from the rocks he excavated while improving the cave entrance:

It must be an incredible view on a clear day, but it was beautiful even on this overcast night.

There is still SO much that I wanted to do in Chattanooga that we didn't have time for! I want to revisit the national park sites, ride the incline railway, stay in the Chattanooga Choo-Choo hotel, kayak to that island in the Tennessee River, and visit the bakery that I'd promised to bring Syd treats home from but it turned out to be closed on Labor Day, oops.

Next time!