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.

22 places · United States

More to explore

🕳️ Caves

Jewel Cave National Monument

Custer, SD · Black Hills

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.

🕳️ Caves

Lehman Caves (Great Basin National Park)

Baker, NV · Great Basin

Tucked into the base of Nevada's Snake Range, Lehman Caves packs more than two miles of marble passage with one of the densest concentrations of cave decoration anywhere in the country. The walls drip with stalactites, columns, and cave bacon, but the real signature is the shields: over 300 of these rare parasol-shaped formations, crowned by the famous Parachute Shield trailing its fringe of skinny stalactites. Rangers lead small lantern and Grand Palace tours year-round through rooms like the Gothic Palace and the Music Room, where the air holds a steady 50 degrees and the formations are still quietly growing.

🕳️ Caves

Oregon Caves National Monument

Cave Junction, OR · Siskiyou Mountains

Twenty miles up a mountain road from Cave Junction, the Marble Halls of Oregon are one of only a handful of caves in the country carved from marble rather than limestone, and the rangers still lead you through by the glow of handheld candlelight on the seasonal tour. The half-mile route climbs past the massive Ghost Room, the soda-straw stalactites and drapery of Paradise Lost, and the underground stream the old guides named the River Styx, with calcite columns and flowstone that took hundreds of thousands of years to form. It is a tight, hands-on cave with low ceilings and 500 steps, not a paved walk-through, which is exactly why it stays one of the West's most memorable underground hours.

🕳️ Caves

Crystal Cave (Sequoia National Park)

Three Rivers, CA · Sierra Nevada

Behind a wrought-iron spider-web gate the Civilian Conservation Corps forged in 1940, Crystal Cave opens into a marble cavern an underground stream carved and is still polishing smooth. The lantern-and-walking tour, the only way in, winds a half-mile loop past stalactites, draperies, soda straws, and rimstone dams, with whole walls of marble worn to a sheen by the water. It is the single cave open to the public out of more than 240 mapped in the park, holding a steady 48 degrees while the Sierra bakes overhead.

🕳️ Caves

Howe Caverns

Howes Cave, NY · Mohawk Valley

Ride an elevator six stories down and you land in the largest show cave in the Northeast, where a lantern-lit path runs a mile and a quarter past banded rose-and-cream limestone, the towering Titan's Temple chamber, and formations the old guides named the Bridal Altar and the Sentinels. The walk traces the River Styx, the underground stream that carved all of this over millions of years, before it opens onto the Lake of Venus. There you trade your feet for a flat-bottomed boat and glide across water so still it mirrors the rock overhead, the quiet payoff that makes the trip out to Howes Cave worth it.

🕳️ Caves

Cave of the Mounds

Blue Mounds, WI · Driftless Area

Twenty miles west of Madison, a routine 1939 quarry blast tore open a hidden room and revealed what locals now call the jewel box of the Midwest. The walls drip with stalactites, soda straws, and helictites stained red and brown by iron, with cool blues and grays where manganese took hold, all of it mirrored in still pools that sit dead calm on the cave floor. Take the year-round guided walk through chambers two stories tall, or come for a lantern tour and find your way through the dark the way the first explorers did in the year it was found.

🕳️ Caves

Marengo Cave

Marengo, IN · Indiana Cave Country

Two schoolchildren stumbled into Marengo Cave on a September afternoon in 1883, and tours have run almost without pause ever since, which makes this one of the oldest show caves in the country. The reason it became a National Natural Landmark is the sheer density of the decoration: the Crystal Palace and Queen's Palace chambers are packed wall to wall with stalactites, soda straws, and honey-colored flowstone draperies, earning it a reputation as the most heavily ornamented cavern in the region. Two walking tours split the difference, the quick Crystal Palace loop through the showpiece rooms and the longer Dripstone Trail past totem-pole formations and the cave's underground stream level, both held at a steady 52 degrees year round.

🕳️ Caves

Bluespring Caverns

Bedford, IN · Indiana Cave Country

Eighty feet under the limestone of southern Indiana, you board a small boat and glide onto the Myst'ry River, the longest navigable underground river in the country. The guide's light sweeps across mirror-still water and rippled rock while blind cavefish, born without eyes after generations in the dark, drift below the hull. It stays a steady 54 degrees down here, the air is damp and close, and for an hour the only world is the one your lantern reaches.

🕳️ Caves

Meramec Caverns

Sullivan, MO · Missouri Ozarks

Cut into the Ozark hills outside Sullivan, Meramec Caverns runs more than four and a half miles through seven levels of limestone, and the formations earn the billboards: the Stage Curtain alone is a sheet of flowstone seven stories tall, lit up for the cave's sound and light show. Cool corridors open onto draped columns, a wine-table formation, and the Mirror Room, where a shallow pool throws the ceiling back at you and looks fifty feet deep. Book the lantern tour and you walk it the way the early guides and the Jesse James legend did, by flame instead of floodlight, with the limestone close enough to read.

🕳️ Caves

Fantastic Caverns

Springfield, MO · Missouri Ozarks

This is the one cave in North America you tour entirely from your seat, riding a propane Jeep-drawn tram down the bed of an ancient underground river for about a mile. The route runs beneath a low canopy of stalactites, soda straws, and cave coral past the Hall of Giants, a pair of massive columns named in 1867 by the twelve women who first explored here. A hunting dog found the opening in 1862, and the air stays a steady 60 degrees while the headlamps catch mineral pearls in the still pools below.

🕳️ Caves

Caverns of Sonora

Sonora, TX · Texas Hill Country

Out on the dry ranchland west of Sonora, a staircase drops 155 feet into a cave that mineralogists rank among the most beautiful on the planet, and the reason is the helictites: thousands of translucent calcite crystals that twist sideways and curl against gravity, packed so thick in one passage it is called the snake pit. The guided Crystal Palace tour winds close to two miles past coral-like clusters, fishtail crystals, and the famous butterfly formation, all of it still wet and growing in 98 percent humidity. It stays an even 72 degrees down here year round, so the cave is just as worth the drive in August as in January.

🕳️ Caves

Cumberland Caverns

McMinnville, TN · Cumberland Plateau

Tennessee's third longest cave runs more than 27 miles under the Cumberland Plateau, but the moment everyone remembers is the Volcano Room, a vaulted chamber where a crystal chandelier rescued from a 1920s Brooklyn theater hangs 60 feet over the floor and live bluegrass fills the dark. Walking tours pass the Hall of the Mountain King, a passage nearly two football fields long, while the Lanterns and Legends tour cuts the lights and hands you a flame to read the formations the way the first explorers did. It earned National Natural Landmark status in 1973, and between the wild rooms, the underground concerts, and the lantern-lit history, it lands on the short list of caves worth the drive.

🕳️ Caves

Lava Beds National Monument

Tulelake, CA · Modoc Plateau

Tucked into a high desert plateau near the Oregon line, Lava Beds hides more than 800 lava tube caves under its sagebrush, the densest concentration in North America, and 27 of them have marked entrances you can drop into with a headlamp. Underground, the tubes run for hundreds of feet at a stretch: the long tunnels of Catacombs and Sentinel, the ceiling of Golden Dome lit gold where water beads on a film of cave bacteria, and the year round ice of Crystal Ice and Skull caves, frozen columns and pools sitting in the dark of a basalt desert. Above ground are Petroglyph Point, one of the largest rock art panels in the country, and Captain Jack's Stronghold, where Modoc fighters held off the US Army for five months in the lava maze.

🕳️ Caves

Blanchard Springs Caverns

Mountain View, AR · Ozark National Forest

The only show cave the U.S. Forest Service runs, and it earns the title: 366 feet down, past 686 stair steps on the Discovery Trail, a stream rises cold and clear at a steady 58 degrees and threads through chambers the size of cathedrals. The Giant Flowstone is the showstopper, 164 feet of golden calcite spilling like frozen water into a still green pool, while soda straws, rimstone dams, and the white-draped Ghost Room fill out the half-mile Dripstone tour. Bring a layer, take the lantern-lit walk slow, and watch a living cave still build itself one drip at a time.