Fall is a great time for outdoor fun. But if you’re looking for an adventure that doesn’t require sunscreen (because you need it all year-round), consider heading underground.
Just three hours from Atlanta, Cathedral Caverns State Park in Alabama offers tours of its extraordinary natural wonders. The best part? It’s about 60 degrees there all the time.
Originally called the Bat Cave, the cavern’s 126-foot-wide and 25-foot-high entrance is large enough for Batman to get any of his vehicles in.
But it was Jacob Gurley, not Bruce Wayne, who renamed it and opened Cathedral Caverns to the public in the 1950s. The state of Alabama bought the caverns in 1987 and opened them as a state park in the summer of 2000.
“Inside the cavern are some of the most beautiful formations Mother Nature has ever created,” according to the park’s website. They include “Goliath,” one of the largest stalagmites in the world, measuring 45 feet tall and 243 feet in circumference. You also will see: a “caveman” perched atop a flowstone wall, a “frozen” waterfall, a large stalagmite forest and a most improbable stone formation — a stalagmite that is 27 feet tall but just 3 inches wide.
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The park itself covers 493 acres with plenty of marked hiking trails. And when you want to stay put for a while, try your hand at gemstone mining. You buy a bag or bucket of mining dirt containing either rough cut gemstones or fossils, then you sift it through running water in custom-made flumes. You can identify your finds using the gemstone identification display.
For cave tour dates, times and prices, click here.
If one cavern isn’t enough for you, drive from Cathedral Caverns State Park to Majestic Caverns (formerly called DeSoto Caverns) in nearby Childersburg, Alabama.
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