HORSE CAVE — In a supply shack at the American Cave Museum in Horse Cave, Peggy Nims prepares to take a tour group into Hidden River Cave.
Nims, the museum’s education director, explains the cave’s history and offers safety tips. She then helps group members try on hard hats and adjust headlamps. The group descends narrow stone steps leading into the mouth of the cave and embarks on the three-hour Cave Adventure Tour.
Laura Duvall of Greenville in Muhlenberg County took the tour recently with her family, including husband Brian, sons Jacob and Jeremy – 12 and 9 years old, respectively – and 11-year-old nephew Tyler Gentry of Webster County. Adventurous 17-year-old Lee Bridges, who didn’t mind the mud at all, also took the tour with Michele McDuffie, Bridges’ mother.
Nims’ students know her as the “mud woman” or, more commonly, the “cave woman.”
“Those who venture into the cave with me know that they will get muddy as we crawl, slither and traverse the muddy banks of Hidden River Cave’s upstream sections,” Nims said.
Before venturing into the cave, Nims explained the different kinds of mud the cavers would encounter – slippery mud called “peanut butter” and sticky mud called “bubble gum.” The cavers crawl through tight-squeeze tunnels on their hands and knees and pass through chambers with names like the “puzzle room,” which is littered with jigsaw-like rocks.
At one point, Nims stops the group to point out a portion of the cave’s wall that has been damaged. Cleaning solvent someone used to clean a driveway leaked into the cave and left a scar.
After scooting along muddy riverbanks and climbing over rocks with the rest of the group, Laura Duvall pauses for a rest while the group explores another branch of the cave.
“I like how we’re working as a team,” said Duvall, a teacher at Livermore Elementary School in McLean County.
It’s her first wild cave tour, and Duvall “definitely” recommends it. She’s been on other cave tours but never one quite like the American Cave Museum’s.
One of her favorite moments was watching the boys scramble up rocks to check a pair of sleeping tri-colored bats for white-nose syndrome, a disease that has killed millions of bats in North America in recent years. Following Nims’ instructions, and without disturbing the bats, the boys look for white fungus around the bats’ mouths and find no sign of the syndrome that was recently found in Mammoth Cave National Park. Despite the mud clouding the waters of the cave, the boys find other animals – six crawfish and a cave cricket.
Animals couldn’t always thrive here. Although originally a source of drinking water and hydroelectric power, Hidden River Cave became badly polluted between 1943 and 1993 because of dumping in upstream sinkholes.
“For so many years, too many people assumed that the underground world and the surface were two different, independent systems,” Nims said in an email. “It was this type of thinking that caused the destruction of Hidden River Cave’s habitat.”
Nims, 63, born and raised in Horse Cave, said the cave became an open sewer and that she still remembers riding her bike on the other side of the street to avoid the stench.
Nims later moved away and returned after several years. In 1994, Nims discovered that the American Cave Conservation Association was working to restore the cave. Dave Foster, ACCA executive director, said the cave’s pollution problem was so bad that industrial development had to be halted until the situation improved. Waste dumped into the ground was flowing into the Green River and Mammoth Cave.
The Environmental Protection Agency, the ACCA, the National Park Service, federal, state and local governments and volunteers helped clean up the cave. Their efforts resulted in the creation of a regional waste management system that helped restore the cave – the Caveland Environmental Authority, Nims said. Building the treatment facility allowed jobs to return to the area, Foster said.
The cave’s problems didn’t deter the ACCA, which was also looking to create a museum.
“We thought we’d like to be the first national cave museum in the country,” Foster said.
Today, the American Cave Museum receives 12,000 visitors annually and that number is rising, Foster said. That doesn’t mean the museum hasn’t had its hard times. During the Great Recession it almost closed its doors after a drop in visitors and donations. Foster said the museum struggled to overcome the “stuffy and scientific” image museums in general have and the expectation that museums are government-funded. Competing against Mammoth Cave National Park was also challenging, Foster said. But the museum was determined to survive.
“My motto is we were too small to fail,” Foster said.
The situation improved after the museum decided to cater to tourists seeking adventure.
“We started doing that two years ago, and it has turned us around,” he said.
After the museum added a zipline, its online reviews started to improve. Foster said the museum moved away from catering to senior citizens and is now getting more families with children wanting adventure tourism.
The promise of adventure attracted McDuffie and Bridges to the tour. McDuffie, from Charlotte, N.C., was traveling with Bridges on his spring break. She said they to like to challenge themselves and appreciated how the tour takes you off the beaten path.
“Everywhere you turn was something completely undiscovered,” she said.
Bridges said one of his favorite parts of the tour was peering down a flooded tunnel to spy crawfish hidden in the muddy water. The tour was a lot of fun, he said.
McDuffie said it absolutely matched her expectations.
“I think it’s a unique way of seeing what we don’t see every day.”
— Follow Daily News intern Aaron Mudd on Twitter at twitter.com/aaron_muddbgdn or visit bgdailynews.com.
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