Lookout Mountain Caverns and Cavern Castle

About this property

Ruby Falls is a 85 feet (26 m) tall waterfall in Ruby Falls Cave of Lookout Mountain, in Chattanooga, Tennessee, United States. The cave is commercialized with electric lights, paved foot trails, and an elevator for access. The waterfall may only be visited by guided tour. About 300 to 360 million years ago (in the Carboniferous Period, at the end of the Paleozoic Era), the eastern Tennessee area was covered with a shallow sea, the sediments of which eventually formed limestone rock. About 200 million years ago, this area was uplifted, forming Lookout Mountain and nearby ridges. Slightly acidic groundwater running through cracks in the limestone slowly dissolved the relatively soluble rock, causing narrow cracks to widen into passages. This process, called chemical weathering, caused various caves to form inside Lookout Mountain. Among them were Lookout Mountain Cave, which had a natural entrance that opened to the surface, and Ruby Falls Cave, which did not. The two were unconnected until developers joined them to create Lookout Mountain Caverns. Ruby Falls Cave is the upper of the two and contains a variety of geological formations and curiosities that Lookout Mountain Cave does not have. Ruby Falls Cave features many of the more well-known types of cave formations (or speleothems) including stalactites and stalagmites, columns, drapery, and flowstone. The Falls are located at the end of the main passage of Ruby Falls Cave, in a vertical shaft called a dome/pit. The underground waterfall and stream is fed by meteoric water (e.g. rainwater) that percolates into the cave from the surface. It collects in a pool in the cave floor and then continues through the mountain, through a second deeper pit, and finally resurges as a natural spring to the Tennessee River at the base of Lookout Mountain. Like all caves in the region, the waterfall is naturally seasonally dependent and would be dry during certain times of the year. However, water is artificially circulated via pumps to maintain water flow year-round. Ruby Falls Cave was discovered in 1928. The cave had no known natural entrances and thus it lacked the artifacts sometimes associated with caves in the southeastern United States. In 1905, the natural entrance to the neighboring Lookout Mountain Cave was closed during the construction of a railway tunnel. In the 1920s, a chemist and cave enthusiast named Leo Lambert thought that he could re-open the cave as a tourist attraction, and formed a company to do so. He planned to make an opening farther up the mountain than the original opening and transport tourists to the cave via an elevator. For this purpose, his company purchased land on the side of Lookout Mountain above Lookout Mountain Cave and in 1928 began to drill through the limestone. In doing so, they discovered a small passageway about 18 inches (0.46 m) high and 4 feet (1.2 m) wide. Exploring this opening, Lambert discovered the never-before-seen underground waterfall. On his next trip to visit the cave, Lambert took his wife Ruby, and told her that he would name the falls after her.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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