Luray Caverns

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The "Fried Eggs" rock formation at Luray Caverns.

Luray Caverns is a large commercial cavern in Luray, Virginia (USA). It is an underground cavern system filled with columns, mud flows, stalactites, stalagmites, flowstone, mirrored pools and many other formations. The cavern is famous for The Great Stalacpipe Organ, which is made from solenoid fired strikers that tap stalactites of specific diameter and length to produce a tone that has been compared to that of a xylophone, tuning fork, or bell.

1 Geology
2 History
3 Other Facts
4 See also
5 References
6 External links

[edit] Geology

The valley extends from the Blue Ridge to the Massanutten Mountains. The ridges lie in vast folds and wrinkles; and elevations in the valley are often found to be pierced by erosion. Cave Hill, 927 feet above sea level, had long been an object of local interest on account of its pits and oval hollows or sinkholes, through one of which, on the 13th of August 1878, Andrew J. Campbell, William Campbell, and Benton Stebbins entered, thus discovering the cavern now described.

Luray Caverns does not date beyond the Tertiary period, though carved from the Silurian limestone. At some period, niches and already formed chambers were completely filled with water, highly charged with acid, which then slowly began to eat away at much of the softer material composing much of the walls, ceilings and floors. One particular area that shows this high level of water is Elfin Ramble where water marks of oscillation are highly visible on the ceiling.

After the water had been mostly removed by a lowering in the water table, these eroded forms remained and growth began to take hold via stalactites, stalagmites, columns, etc. To this contrast may be ascribed some of the most striking scenes in the cave. The many and extraordinary monuments of aqueous energy include massive columns wrenched from their place in the ceiling and prostrate on the floor; the Leaning Column nearly as large, undermined and tilting like the campanile of Pisa; the Organ, a large shield formation, that was used from very early on as an instruement to a variety of folk and religious songs (see The Great Stalacpipe Organ); besides a vast bed of disintegrated carbonates left by the whirling flood in its retreat through the great space called the Elfin Ramble.

The stalactitic display exceeds that of any other cavern known. The old material is yellow, brown or red; and, its wavy surface often shows layers like the gnarled grain of costly woods. The new stalactites growing from the old, and made of hard carbonates that had already once been used, are usually white as snow though often pink or amber-colored. The Empress Column is a stalagmite 35 feet high, rose-colored, and elaborately draped. The double column, named from Professors Henry and Baird, is made of two fluted pillars side by side, the one 25 ft the other 60 feet high, a mass of snowy alabaster. Several stalactites in Giant's Hall exceed 5 feet in length. The smaller pendants are innumerable; in the canopy above the Imperial Spring it is estimated that 40,000 are visible at once.

The cascades are formations like foaming cataracts caught in mid-air and transformed into milk-white or amber alabaster. Brands Cascade, the finest of all, is 40 feet high and 30 feet wide, and is an unsullied and wax-like white, each ripple and braided nil seeming to have been polished.

Draperies are abundant throughout the cavern and one of the most spectacular examples of such is Saracen's tent. The drapery formation can be found in all major rooms and fill the cavern with tones like tolling bells when struck heavily by the hand. Their origin and also that of certain so-called scarfs and blankets is from carbonates deposited by water trickling down a sloping and corrugated surface. Sixteen of these alabaster scarfs hang side by side in Hoveys Balcony, three white and fine as crape shawls, thirteen striated like agate with every possible shade of brown.

Some formations are perfectly translucent. Down the edge of each a tiny nil glistens like silver, and this is the ever-plying shuttle that weaves the fairy fabric.

Streams and true springs are absent, but there are hundreds of basins, varying from 1 to 50 feet in diameter, and from 6 inches to 15 feet in depth. The water in them is exquisitely pure except as it is impregnated by the carbonate of lime, which often forms concretions, called pearls, eggs, and snowballs, according to their size. On the fracture these spherical growths are found to be radiated in structure.

Calcite crystals, drusy, feathery or fern-like, line the sides and bottom of every water-filled cavity, and indeed constitute the substance of which they are made. Variations of level at different periods are marked by rings, ridges and ruffled margins. These are strongly marked about Broaddus Lake and the curved ramparts of the Castles on the Rhine. Here also are polished stalagmites, a rich buff slashed with white, and others, like huge mushrooms, with a velvety coat of red, purple or olive-tinted crystals. In some of the smaller basins it sometimes happens that, when the excess of carbonic acid escapes rapidly, there is formed, besides the crystal bed below, a film above, shot like a sheet of ice across the surface. One pool 12 feet wide is thus covered so as to show but a third of its surface.

The quantity of water in the cavern varies greatly at different seasons. Hence some stalactites have their tips under water long enough to allow tassels of crystals to grow on them, which, in a drier season, are again coated over with stalactitic matter; and thus singular distortions are occasioned. Contiguous stalactites are often inwrapped thus until they assume an almost globular form, through which by making a section the primary tubes appear. Twig-like projections are met with in certain portions of the cave, and are interesting by their strange and uncouth contortions. Their presence is due to lateral outgrowths of crystals shooting from the side of a growing stalactite, or to deflections caused by currents of air, or to the existence of a diminutive fungus peculiar to the locality and designated from its habitat Mucor stalaclitis.

The dimensions of the various chambers included in Luray Caverns cannot be easily stated, on account of the great irregularity of their outlines. But it should be understood that there are several tiers of galleries, and the vertical depth from the highest to the lowest is 260 feet. The large tract of land owned by the Luray Caverns Corporation covers all possible modes of entrance.

The waters of this cavern contains some forms of life, most abundantly are tiny freshwater shrimp; also existing in the caverns are tiny lizards common to the area as well as a few insects such as spiders, flies, and small centipedes. There are also several forms of "cave algae" and "cave moss" growing naturally in the Cavern due to lighting and humidity. A fern grows in the entrance chamber, but this was actually planted there, and does not grow naturally.

[edit] History

Luray Caverns was founded on August 13 of 1878 by three local men. Andrew Campbell, and his newphew - William Campbell, along with Benton Stebbins. They first noticed that there was limestone protruding from the ground, a characteristic of caverns being beneath. A nearby sinkhole was found to have a light current of cool air coming out of it. The men decided that there was a cavern or some sort of cavity underneath, and they started to dig. Around 5 hours later, after much digging, they made a hole for the smallest man to get through. The first man to enter was Andrew Campbell. The first column Andrew Campbell saw, he named the Washington Column, in honor of the first United States President George Washington.

Also, upon entering the area called "Skeleton's Gorge," the men found bone fragments among other things embedded in calcite. The traces of human occupation were pieces of charcoal, flint, and human bone fragments embedded in stalagmite. This skeleton, thought to be one of a young Native American girl, in one of the chasms, is estimated, from the present rate of stalagmitic growth, to have lain where found for not more than five hundred years. Her skeletal remains probably slipped into the caverns after her burial hole collapsed due to a sinkhole, although the real cause is still a mystery. Her remains are now in storage at the American History Museum in Washington, D.C.

[edit] Other Facts

The temperature is uniformly 54°F, coinciding with that of Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. The air is very pure, and the avenues are not uncomfortably damp. The portions open to the public are now electrically lighted. The registered number of visitors in 1906 was 18,000, but now, about 500,000 guests visit each year. A unique and highly successful experiment merits mention, by which the cool pure air of Luray Caverns is forced through all the rooms of the Limair Sanatorium, erected in 1901, by Mr. T.C. Northcott, former president of the Luray Caverns Corporation, on the summit of Cave Hill. Tests made for several successive years by means of culture media and sterile plates, demonstrated the perfect bacteriologic purity of the air, first drawn into the caverns through myriads of rocky crevices that served as natural filters, then further cleansed by floating over the transparent springs and pools, and finally supplied to the inmates of the sanatorium. The sanatorium, called "Limair", burned down in the early 1900s but was rebuilt as a brick building.