Conversation with My Wife (173)

A trip to Indian Echo (echo echo…) Caverns (caverns caverns…)

Caves are pretty. Also: there are doors that close at night, so no bats. Lately. (all photos by author)

We decided, many years ago, that we would visit all the tourist caves in Pennsylvania. There are eight. Deb found a brochure and a website. (We aren’t excluding non-PA caves, mind you, we just think we should focus on the closest ones first.) And now that we’re retired (and tourist season is over, meaning no crowds on weekdays) we figured we should get going.

Indian Echo Caverns is the closest one, but it’s the fifth one we’ve been to. It’s also the only one Deb has been to before, as a kid. We think.

DEB: I can remember the steps. Over 200 wooden steps, something like that. They went down forever.

Our tour guide, Daniel, said there were 71 steps. And they turned out to be all concrete. Well, Deb may have been to a different cave. Or the steps got replaced?

Sign at the gift shop; entrance to the caverns themselves. The cave entrance is closed and locked outside working hours; our guide told that on winter days, when the outside temp is cold and dry and the inside temp is relatively warm (52°F) and damp, opening up the cave in the morning causes a steam cloud like “an NFL team coming onto the field.” He had a friend video him emerging from the steam cloud like a football player so he could sent it to his mother.

DANIEL: (as we entered the cave) If you have a phone, you might want to put it on airplane mode. There’s no signal in the cave, of course, so your phone just uses up battery trying to connect.

ME: So this is our fifth cave, and somebody finally mentions that? (while kicking myself because DOH! of course! fine technogeek I turned out to be)

DANIEL: During the early days of the cave, when people could just wander in and out, there was a lot of destruction because people didn’t know any better. Like they just broke off stalactites because they look like icicles, that grow back. They didn’t realize that even a small stalactite takes hundreds of years to form. Or they carved initials. Or they painted ads. No really! There’s one that says, “In Lebanon¹, Buy Roush’s Pretzels.” We looked it up, and the company went out of business over a hundred years ago. So I’m not a marketing person, but I’m just thinking, if you want your business to do well, don’t put up ads in caves.

Many formations were damaged by people in the early years of the cave. Now the graffiti is part of the cave’s history. Even though nobody knows who “LMY,” “IFY,” and “IGY” were.

All the caves in Pennsylvania that we’ve been to so far were formed by water dissolving the limestone. In the case of Indian Echo Cavern, it is located so close to a creek that it still floods occasionally from water entering the front door—the last time it happened, the company installed sump pumps to minimize the time lost waiting for the water to drain out. Even during non-flooding “wet” rainy years, Daniel said that tours would be getting dripped on almost continuously. Since we had a relatively dry August and September, we only had a few drips.

The main pool, with very clear water.

DANIEL: The cave was once a closed environment, of course, but now with tour groups going through every day, we have a continuous influx of plant spores. You can see several places where the stones are green; that’s not the stone color, that’s algae or moss or some other plant. When the cave was shut down for a couple of months at the start of COVID, there was nobody going in or out, and all the lights were out. All the plants died. It was really very startling coming back into the caves when we opened up again. But now, as you can see, the plants are already back again.

Green on rocks in a cave—at least, these caves—means plant life. In other caves we’ve been to, the plants established themselves, then critters came in that lived on the plants, then bigger critters came in that lived on the little critters. A whole sub-ecosystem just based on artificial lights. Even switching to LEDs didn’t help.

The nice thing about “tourist” caves is that they require no special ability beyond climbing up and down a lot of stairs. And ducking. Ducking is a big deal. Actually, ducking should probably be the first required ability listed.

The main cave is referred to as the “ballroom” because of its size (note the person silhouette for scale), but even the side caverns went up at least a hundred feet.

DEB: I think we’ll want to finish off these caves sooner rather than later, honey. I had an awful time waiting for my eyes to adjust when we first got inside.

ME: It wasn’t just you. I was half-blind for the first couple/five minutes after we got in.

The lights are very nice inside, once your eyes adjust, but older eyes take longer, and as our eyes get even older… Fortunately, the paths were mostly even.

DEB: Also, with the masks…

ME: Yeah, I saw you take your glasses off a few times when we were moving, so I did the same thing.

Warm, moist exhalations from the top of the masks hit cool, saturated air in the cave, and our glasses fogged. Fortunately, the light in the cave was bright enough (and our eyesight without glasses was good enough) to walk along without hitting our heads or running into walls. Daniel said he learned to wear his contacts when he’s leading tours.

Butterfly bushes and butterflies. Not all the attractions were underground.

The tour was fun, Daniel was an excellent and entertaining guide, and 71 steps back up were not bad (Deb and I are both proud of ourselves for exercising and losing weight in retirement, although I’ve been on a few baking binges where I have not helped that). And there were pretty things to see above ground, too.

There was a large cage outside the gift shop holding peafowl, because… no clue. Somebody likes pretty birds?

DEB: Are you having a good time, Jackster?

ME: I am, Debster! I get to go driving with you, and see things with you, and share life with you, and it’s all good. Thank you for thinking of this and planning it all!

¹I should mention, for the benefit of those of you who are not from around here, that the “Lebanon” is Lebanon, PA. Pronounced “LEB-nun” by the locals. It’s the county (with an eponymous county seat city) just north of Lancaster (locally pronounced “LANK-uh-stir” not “LAN-cast-er”). I could make fun, but I grew up in a state (Illinois) where the local town of Marseilles is pronounced “mar-SALES” and the town of Cairo is “KAY-row” so, y’know, first stones and all that. Roy and Randomly Me can probably come up with more Illinois local pronunciation examples.

Other cave experiences:

Conversation with My Wife (172)

Pictures from a Trip to Penn’s Cave

Copyright ©2020 by Jack Herlocker. All rights reserved, and if you steal this we’ll write something nasty about you on the wall of our next cave.

Conversations with My Wife (collection)