Endless Caverns: My Favorite Cavern
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| Inside Endless Caverns | ||||
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| Hibernating Female Indiana Bats | ||||
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Two weekends ago Chris and I visited Endless Caverns in New Market, VA, for about the sixth time. It’s a little over two hours from northern Virginia.
Endless Caverns is my favorite cavern for three reasons.
- They have the most stunning views of many different types of formations.
- They have the best tour guides — by far the most knowledgeable about cavern geology, history, and biology. And it’s obvious that they love what they’re doing.
- They have the most bats!
During the last tour, we had the good fortune of being with a really large, raucous group of people from Minnesota and Pennsylvania, including a high school astronomy club from Allentown, Pennsylvania.
Four species of bats frequent Endless Caverns. All of the other bats we have seen hibernating in caverns sleep upside-down solo. The Indiana bats — an endangered species — hibernate in colonies (I think of them as “clumps”). I just read online that sometimes as many as three hundred bats have been found huddled together in one square foot.
After our tour guide, James, showed us a group of female Indiana bats piled on top of each other, a woman in the group asked if they were lesbian bats. Those who could hear her broke out in laughter.
Endless Caverns also has more natural lighting than the more commercial caverns, which we prefer, and a beautiful campground to boot.
