Taking a day trip up I-75 to explore an underground wonderland
I start off with my dad, Jack McCormick, a civil engineer with deep knowledge of hydrogeology. We leave Soddy Daisy headed for Athens, where we’ll pick up I-75 and travel north.
We pass ponds, cattails, loose chickens pecking in yards, barns in various states of disrepair. Rain starts to splatter as we enter Decatur, and it keeps raining up past Athens.
The Lost Sea is located in Craighead Caverns between Sweetwater and Madisonville. The cave was explored by the 18th century, served as a Cherokee meeting place, was used as a saltpeter mine during the Civil War, and was surveyed for a variety of uses during the 20th century—most recently for a fallout shelter during the cold war.
In 1939, impressive Pleistocene-era jaguar remains were found in the cave. The discovery of the Lost Sea is also relatively recent—the underground lake was found by a 13-year-old boy, Ben Sands, in 1905, but nobody believed him until years later. When adults originally attempted to verify his story, high waters completely filled the way to the “lake” he described.
We drive up and down hill as McCormick relates all this. “These parallel ridges are the edges of parallel fault lines where one side has sheared off,” he says. “That’s why we’re going to be going downhill once we enter the cave—the bedding plains are tilted up.”
A bedding plain, he explains, forms where sediments settle out and harden into rock, usually in standing water. They’re typically horizontal to the earth’s surface. After they harden, though, as the plates beneath them move, they can push against each other and fracture, resulting in the unique structure of Craighead Caverns.
“This is a fault line cave,” he says. “We’ll walk downhill along the bedding plain to the water table.”
We pass through Sweetwater, cross one ridge, and mount another. The rain has stopped and the air’s cooler. Popular and tulip trees tower like cathedral columns, while light slants down between. Tickets are only $10 each—an August special—but we have to wait more than two hours to start.
While we wait, we check out the old timey exhibits. A smithy with a rotting bellows. A mowing machine. A pump. A sweet shop. A general store selling impedimenta—plush gnomes, geological specimens labeled as products of India or China. There’s a melancholy kitsch that the majesty of the hills can only partly dispel.
Inside the cave, our guide delivers a well-practiced spiel, but he’s constantly interrupted by an infant wailing and cross-talk from our group of 20. When he turns out the cave lights so we can experience “total darkness” several people instantly tap their cell phones for light.
There’s a smell of cave dank, but also of sweat, cigarette smoke, perfume. Mold and even small plants grow around the lights—all products of the detritus and tracked-in seeds from tourists’ bodies, our guide explains.
Most interesting are the rock formations. The ceiling’s stained white and rusty red with different minerals, and anthrodites—intricate cave flowers formed when crystals of calcium carbonite or gypsum radiate out from a common center—grow everywhere along the crevices in the ceiling.
The guide describes the ceiling as being carved out by moving water, but McCormick later says, “It’s a free attic ceiling, formed underwater by the dissolution of the limestone. Different solubilities of different parts of the stone form the unevenness.”
The lake itself is about 800 feet long by 220 feet wide according to Lost Sea literature, though a Tennessee state survey records dimensions of 600 by 200 feet. From the swaying boat dock, we can see lights along the far edges of the water. There’s at least one larger, lower lake, completely submerged in the darkness.
We wherry around at two miles an hour while fish cluster to the boat and the words of the tours before and after us echo across the water. When I was a little girl, the boats were glass-bottomed, but these aren’t.
We’re never alone enough for mystery and the guide’s puns are getting tired. Yet I can sense the mystery that would be there—if everyone could just be quiet.
The uphill climb out is said to be challenging. In fact, McCormick, 76 years old, strides back up the 300-foot incline easily. Then we’re back outside in the dewy dusk.
Jenn Webster is a dancer and technical writer by trade who has also written for marketing, educational, and consumer publications. She’s an Army veteran and a member of WEAVE: A Conceptual Dance Company.