| Current mood: |  tired |
Crystal Grottoes
Today featured a trip to Crystal Grottoes outside of Boonsboro, MD. It's only an hour away, so we left around 2pm, taking mostly backroads through the rural and scenic Catoctin mountains.
Along the way, we attempted to make a brief stop in Burkittsville, MD where there's a little-known gravity hill. You can put your car in neutral and, while it looks flat, your car will roll backwards because it's an optical illusion. Unfortunately, there was no parking and it was busy enough that we couldn't just stop and roll back and forth or even get out and come back to it, so we planned to come back later (but didn't).
Crystal Grottoes is a tiny attraction in the middle of farmland. Above ground, it's little more than a single old building (see link above for a pic). Unfortunately, they had a severe fire in the last month and the top floor was gutted, windows were gone, and the main floor was damaged. Nevertheless, the owner greeted us outside, insisted they were open, and we paid the $15 each at the lone remaining counter in the foyer, around which lay piles of construction equipment as they rebuilt. We played with the site's resident brown lab doggy while we waited for the next tour.
The cave itself has some very big positives and some very bad negatives. The good: the most formations of any showcave known; the passages are narrow and low, so you're literally eye-to-eye with gorgeous examples of flowstone, active stalactites, pillars, and curtains. The bad: At least 25% of the formations are broken from either the original excavation, poor maintenance, or abuse; our tour guide was a young guy with a flashlight who was so ignorant of the subject matter that he didn't know what a fault line was; the tour is somewhat hurried so you don't get too long to examine the up-close formations; and there are many passages that looked opportune for exploring, but weren't open yet - the guide even admitted that 900ft of additional area was available, but had no idea why it was closed.
There are signs all over the cave saying not to touch anything, but our tour guide repeatedly bashed at formations and surfaces in the cave when asked about them, visibly tearing off material. I was wringing my hands while he told us how the curtain stalactites made different sounds and banged on each one to demonstrate - skipping the ones that had clearly broken off from having had that done in the past. These formations took thousands, if not millions of years to develop, and the guide was wrecking them for the amusement of a handful of tourists.
It's a great cave that gave us unprecedented access to sights we could only see in other caves at a distance, but it's being destroyed by the carelessness of the very people who own it. The tourists were more respecting of the cave than the guides. I'm comforted by knowing that there are probably hundreds of other undiscovered caves with features probably rivaling any we've seen that remain safe.
Leaving there, we attempted to find a nice rural diner to grab dinner at, but ended up in Hagerstown before anything turned up, so we landed at a Ryan's, which is like a mini Old Country Buffet. I lurve buffet food, but it's something that has to be done in moderation because that stuff is so bad for you. Luckily, we hadn't been to one in a year or more, so...om nom nom.
We took old route 40 back to Frederick and I saw a record & tape shop where I can offload some of my vinyl that I didn't know what to do with - the nearest trade shop I'd known before this was in DC. And continuing on, we eventually came home.
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rigelkitty) wrote,
