Mega Cavern

Sometimes, Louisville is weird. Like, really odd.  And we're proud of that here.  There's a whole "Stay Weird, Louisville" movement, and I love it.  Because we're a little odd around here, we're willing to do some things differently. Let me give you an example.

From the 1930s through the 1970s, a good chunk of what is part of the bustling metropolis now was home to a huge underground limestone mine.  It shut down in '79 and in the late 80s, a company bought it out.  Not for mining, though.  Oh no, that would be ridiculous.  They bought it out as a building for business.  Yeah, that's right - building.  It's considered one of the tallest buildings in the nation... if you were to lay all tall buildings on their sides.  There is enough room down there to store 40,000 boats.  The thing has 17 miles worth of caves, which are now used as a business park.  You can rent out mini caverns for storage, which lots of places do.  For example, the state of Kentucky's salt reserves are down there.  And the world's biggest margarita contest is held down there in the next mini cavern.  (Kentucky and bourbon usually are drinking buddies, but when you get crunk, you don't turn down an opportunity to drink whatever anyone hands you, apparently.)  But there's more than just salt and random storage in this huge cave that happens to be over the zoo.  Oh, buddy, is there more!


Every year around Christmas, they do what's called "Lights Under Louisville."  Deg and I took some friends and went a year and a half ago - you are welcome to click here to review that event in our lives.  They take big open bed trucks with seats in them and do tours of the caves. And then their latest attraction - the world's first underground zip line.

Guess which one we did this weekend?  There are 5 zip lines, ranging from 80 feet to 900 feet in length.  Some of the lines have you only 15-20 feet off the ground, but some of them have you upwards of 150 feet off the ground.  And each line zips you across underground caverns, valleys, rivers, and other cave-like structures at between 35 to 45 miles per hour.  Beyond the zip lines, there are 3 challenge bridges.  You know in jungle movies how they always have to traverse that scary, wobbly, rickety old bridge over the river 400 feet below?  You know the one - there's a board in the bridge that always snaps and someone always slips and is barely saved?  They have 3 of those for you to cross.

Let me tell you about the experience zip lining.  When my sisters and parents and I were in Hawaii in April, the girls and I went zip lining.  I thought I was gonna freak out because I hate heights.  It turns out that I'm not afraid of heights - just of falling.  I freaked a little on the platform, but as soon as I was buckled in, I was having the time of my life zipping across the jungle.  That's why, when I saw the Mega Zip ads, I knew we just had to go.  Talking Deg into going went something like this:

Jess: Hey Deg, have you heard about the underground zip lines in the caves under the zoo?
Deg: No!  That sounds awesome!  Can we go?!

Thus, it went on my summer wall of stuff (I'll explain that in a later post), and we picked this Saturday as the day to go.  Good thing, too - the cave is always at 58 degrees, and yesterday got up to 105 plus humidity.  Ugh.  So we got online and printed our tickets, our waivers, and off we went.

Have you ever gone on a tour of a cave?  It was kind of like that, except really fast movements and 80s hair band music and sweet lighting effects. We did 3 zip lines in a row, one of which, if you jumped really high when you left the platform, you'd bounce while you zipped the 500 feet, and as we walked from line to line, we got a little of the cave's history and layout.  Then we did 2 of the challenge bridges.  I hated that part.  I asked one of the guides how many people were more scared of the bridges than the zipping, and he laughed and said, "All of them."  That made me feel better.

We talked about how the mine has an underground river flowing above it, which is why there's water dripping and flowing in it and why they are growing stalactites and stalagmites all over the place.  Usually, those things grow an inch every 100 years, but the mineral rich rocks the water flows through to drip out has them growing an inch every 5-10.  It's pretty sweet.  Then, the guides pointed out the dead guy.  There's this lawn gnome type thing you can buy that looks like a zombie popping out of your front lawn.  They totally buried one of those in the rock so it looks like some dude fell and got buried.  It was pretty funny.

We zipped one more line - the longest one of the bunch - through mists and over a river and two canyons, and then our third challenge bridge hit us.  This one went uphill, so it was wobbly, scary, and hard to climb.  I was very glad we were strapped into a cable above the bridge as we walked across it - especially because I slipped at the end and my left leg fell through the bridge.  (Wicked painful bruising, I assure you.)  That led us to our last zip - this one was a double line where you raced someone else.  Deg and I were up - I was primed to beat him - and he cheated and jumped before the end of the count of 3!  That turd!  We ended up tying, so if you take into account his early jump, I totally won.  It's because I'm so fantastic, I'm sure.

It was two hours of caving in a way that was so much fun that I'd do it again in a heartbeat.  So basically, if anyone wants to come visit, I'd love to take you...  (Mom?  Dad?  Siblings?)

And now - the visual proof we went:

Me, all geared up, red-light a'blazin, ready to zip my way across the cave.

Yes, they did the cheezy, overpriced picture thing.  Yes, we bought the cheezy, overpriced picture.  We had to.   You'll notice this one's called the "zipline to hell."  They lit it with red lights and played AC/DC's "Highway to Hell" as you zipped across it.