Cave of Crystal Giants:
More Show Caves in America
Caverns of Sonora
About 200 miles west of San Antonio is a national natural landmark noted for its stunning array of calcite crystal formations, especially helictites, the most delicate and most beautiful of cave formations. National Speleological Society co-founder, Bill Stephenson said, after seeing Caverns of Sonora for the first time, “Its beauty cannot be exaggerated, even by Texans.”
National Cave Association president Gary Berdeaux says entering the caverns is “like stepping into a Faberge egg.” The most famous helictite here is called the Butterfly a after its characteristic form. Even rarer are the anthodites found in this cave.
Kartchner Caverns
This state park about an hour from Tucson boasts one of the world's longest soda straw stalactites – over 21 feet – and the tallest and most massive column in Arizona, Kubla Khan: 58 feet tall. Both are located in the Throne Room. The Big Room features the world's most extensive formation of brushite moonmilk. The caverns contain many other unusual formations such as shields, totems, helictites, and rimstone dams, as well as a nursery roost for more than 1,000 cave bats.
Wind Cave
Wind Cave National Park, located about 50 miles from Rapid City, South Dakota, features one of the world's longest and most complex cave systems. It is best known for it incredible display of boxwork, a rare cave formation of thin calcite fins that resembles honeycomb. Wind Cave is more than 300 million years old, making it one of the oldest in the world. It gets its name from the strong airflow in the cave.
Carlsbad Caverns
Twenty miles southwest of Carlsbad, New Mexico, is a series of enormous rooms that forms one of the world’s largest caves. James White, a Carlsbad-area cowboy, discovered the caverns in 1900, but no one believed his fantastic descriptions of house-size stalagmites and eerie stalactite icicles, pagodas and palaces of improbable beauty. His tales caught the attention of public land officials who assigned federal geologists to explore Carlsbad Caverns. The reports filed by these geologists impressed President Calvin Coolidge, who declared the caverns a National Monument in 1923. The following year, White led a National Geographic expedition into the caverns and the subsequent publicity made the caverns so famous that they were declared a National Park in 1930.
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