Enter­ing the Cave

Over labor day week­end, my dad drove up to Wis­con­sin for a visit. Among other things, we hit the farm­ers’ mar­ket, went for a bike ride, and attempted to tour the Cap­i­tal Brew­ery (but, they were closed for a pri­vate event). But, one of the coolest things we did was a visit to the Cave of the Mounds in Blue Mounds, Wis­con­sin. The cave, which has no nat­ural open­ings of sig­nif­i­cant size, was dis­cov­ered in 1939 dur­ing a lime­stone quar­ry­ing oper­a­tion. Quar­ry­ing was halted, the cave was quickly devel­oped, and pub­lic tours began the fol­low­ing year. Though not a huge cave, the tour took about an hour. High­lights included a six-foot long cephalo­pod fos­sil in the cave’s ceil­ing and some inter­est­ing mul­ti­col­ored cave for­ma­tions.

Pur­ple Asters with Bugs

Cave of the Mounds also offers a cou­ple of short above-ground trails, which we walked after emerg­ing from the cav­ern. The trails offered myr­iad beau­ti­ful plant life, lots of insects and spi­ders, and not a few birds. I wasn’t able to get any decent bird pic­tures, but I did get a few good flower and bug pho­tos. Veron­ica gets the buf-spotting prize for the day; she found a katy­did blend­ing in with leaves, a cou­ple of siz­able grasshop­pers, and a bunch of daddy-long legs, all of which seemed quite con­tent to stay put long enough to be pho­tographed. Click here to see all of my above and below-ground pho­tos from Cave of the Mounds.

Also, here are some of my pre­vi­ous wild cav­ing pic­tures taken in Ten­nessee caves: Camp’s Gulf Cave, Indian Grave Point Cave, Cave of the Skulls, and Christ­mas Cave.