Wild Cave Tour Route

The Wild Cave Tour at Mammoth Cave is the most physically demanding ranger-led program offered in the national park system, taking small groups of participants — capped at 14 people — through undeveloped cave passages far from the paved, lit corridors of the standard tours. Participants must be at least 16 years old, under 230 pounds, and able to fit through an 8-by-24-inch simulated passage at the visitor center before booking. The six-hour tour involves belly crawling through tight squeezes with evocative names like Corkscrew and Keyhole, chimneying through vertical cracks, and traversing mud-floored breakdown rooms strewn with gypsum crystals, cave pearls, and delicate speleothem formations. Participants wear coveralls, kneepads, elbow pads, and hard hats with headlamps. Mammoth Cave is the world's longest known cave system at over 430 mapped miles, and the Wild Cave Tour explores sections of the New Discovery area added to the map in the 1980s. White-nose syndrome, caused by the fungus Pseudogymnoascus destructans, has devastated bat populations in the cave; visitors must use decontaminated clothing to prevent spreading the pathogen to unaffected caves.