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Jewel Cave National Monument

Photo: Murray Foubister / CC BY-SA 2.0 · source

🕳️ Caves

Jewel Cave National Monument

Custer, SD · Black Hills

About

Jewel Cave earns its name underground, where calcite crystals known as nailhead and dogtooth spar glitter across walls that wind on for more than 220 mapped miles, making this the second longest cave in the United States and a place geologists are still actively surveying. The lit Scenic Tour drops you in by elevator to a half mile loop past draped flowstone, delicate boxwork, and ribbons of formation the rangers call cave bacon, while the Historic Lantern Tour hands you a real lantern and walks the rough, early passages the way the first explorers saw them. It is a working scientific frontier dressed as a sightseeing stop, a quiet 13 miles west of Custer in the Black Hills.

Highlights

Third longest cave in the world with over 220 mapped miles still being surveyedWalls of calcite nailhead and dogtooth spar that give the cave its nameScenic Tour: a lit half mile loop reached by elevator past flowstone and boxworkHistoric Lantern Tour through the rough early passages by handheld lanternA breathing cave where air rushes in and out as outside pressure changes

Getting there

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America's Best Caves22 places

America's Best Caves

Step out of the daylight into another world: the longest cave on the planet in Kentucky, a desert chamber big enough to swallow a stadium in New Mexico, an underground waterfall in Tennessee, and a living crystal cavern in Arizona. Some you walk, some you ride a boat through, and one you crawl with a headlamp. America's great caves and caverns, from the national parks to the lantern-lit show caves.