A tour of Mammoth Cave without a blood sugar check

Not every National Park in the United States is an expanse of stunning desert formations or thick green forest. In fact, not all of them are even on the surface of the planet: some like Mammoth Cave in Kentucky are underground.

One of the few Parks east of the Mississippi River, Mammoth Cave is a jewel of the park system. If superlatives impress you (or fill you with national pride), you’ll be happy to know that it is by far the longest known cave system in the world. In fact it’s suspected that its true length is much longer; scientists continue to explore its endless and interconnected cavernous chambers and tight squeezes.

Visitors to the park can sign up for one of several offered guided tours and check out part of the cave system for themselves, and it’s worth setting aside a couple of days to do just that. On Day 40, Masayo and I arrived at the park after a night as the only people in a roadside inn in Glasgow, KY and joined a tour called Domes and Dripstones.

We weren’t the only ones; Ranger Ashley, who was leading the morning’s tour, went out of her way to welcome us to the “sold-out” tour. She gave us a short talk at the visitor center, holding a microphone as we all gathered under a covered area next to several green buses. Her speech covered a little about the history and the geology of Mammoth Cave National Park and included some warnings about claustrophobia on some of the narrower staircases.

I was thinking back to our walk through Carlsbad Caverns a few weeks ago in New Mexico. That two-hour walk turned out to be surprisingly grueling, and came right after lunch (and my lunchtime Humalog shot). I’d needed several packets of glucose while in the deepest part. It all turned out fine, but here I was on a big group tour. Would I have time to stop if needed, to check blood sugar in the spooky dark cave lighting and relax a few minutes?

But getting over fears is a big part of traveling with diabetes. I’ve done a lot of that, but that doesn’t mean I’m over all fears. Walking deep underground away from all services and civilization counts as something that might give a diabetic pause. (Ranger Ashley mentioned that rescues could take eight hours – there are no secret entrances or elevators.) So I knew I needed to shut up my worry and just sally forth. Or, sally down as the case may be.

We all piled onto buses, green (in color and in power) school bus-type vehicles, for a four-mile drive to the cave entrance. I noticed that (how do I put this delicately?) the group was, on average, slimmer than your average group of Americans. A product of the slimness of some of the passages we were going to be going through.

On the bus I checked my blood sugar: it was 214. Higher than expected, but not a total shock after the sugar-heavy meal from the Four Seasons Country Inn, and exactly where I would want it before a long, sweaty subterranean stroll.

At the entrance, a hole fitted with a nice, human-sized wooden door amidst a thick bright green forest of trees (actually planted not 70 years ago onto farmlands), we all descended into the cool damp earth in a single-file line. The metal stairs were steep, wet, and badly lit, but it all felt safe and well-trodden. As long as you don’t hit your head on the rocks jutting out everywhere.

Twisting and turning down 289 steps, listening to the occasional water drips and recoiling at the suddenly-visible albino crickets inches in front of your face, you eventually emerge at the lowest point of this particular tour. In a large chamber lit by subtle electric lights positioned strategically for maximum effect lie several wooden benches in rows.

Ranger Ashley told us to line up on the benches for the first of several talks, and I realized that this was going to be a much easier tour than Carlsbad. It has to accommodate the fitness levels of a large group (we numbered well over a hundred) and the hardest part (the initial stairs) was behind us. I began to relax about my blood sugar, though I reminded myself where the glucose packets were in my bag just in case.

Ranger Ashley’s talk revealed more about the history of Mammoth Cave and offered some juicy tidbits about life inside its chambers – she was especially passionate about the stingerless scorpions and the albino crickets that could drop from a 90-foot ceiling, slowly turn in mid-air, and land unharmed and upright.

My favorite part of the entire day, perhaps, was when Ranger Ashley asked us all to be completely quiet and turned off all the lights. We sat in silence and darkness – and I use those words in their starkest sense. “This is what it’s like in the cave… when we’re not here,” whispered Ashley, a ghostly voice coming out of a true void.

Much of Mammoth Cave, at least on this tour, is made up of rubble and smooth ceilings. It’s not the carnival of wild, eons-old formations that Carlsbad had been. (Though the fact that the flat ceilings were actually the underside of ancient seabeds was pretty awesome.) The end of the tour is where the visual spectacle began.

Stalactites and stalagmites poked from their surfaces vertically in front of wide sheets of water droplet-formed curtains of rock. A stream of water shot out of the ceiling in one spot, splashing on the ground below and testifying to the awesome and patient power of water to carve and shape stone. It was like a bonus to the rest of the tour, a mini-Carlsbad to show that Mammoth Cave can be just as flashy when it wants to.

And with that the tour was over. I hadn’t even checked my blood sugar again – we weren’t walking or climbing enough to make me concerned. After riding back to the visitor center on the same buses and cleaning out shoes in a soapy walkway (to stop fungus from spreading to other caves) I finally checked to see what the cave tour had done to diabetes: I was 94.

A lot of good things happened at Mammoth Cave, including the underscoring of some important points that a diabetic should never get tired of re-learning: Worry is overrated, exercise makes blood sugar go down (in a good way), and being careful leads to better and more adventures in your life. I didn’t know what to expect from Mammoth Cave but I could never have asked for more.

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