At 7,920 feet of tour route, Howe Caverns is the largest show cave in the northeastern United States, and it is set up so that anyone can see it without gear or training. You go down by lift to the main passage, a phreatic tube up to 33 feet high and 20 feet across, cut when the whole thing was full of moving water rather than air.
Guides walk you about 1,600 feet alongside the River Styx, the underground stream still running through the cave, past formations named by earlier generations of guides: the Sentinels, the Bridal Altar, the Titan's Fireplace. The route passes through Titan's Temple, the largest chamber, and then puts you in a boat for a quarter mile on the water, which is the part everyone remembers. On the way back you take the Winding Way, a narrow snaking side canyon that dips downward and feels a good deal more like caving than the main passage does.
Geologically it belongs to the Helderberg Plateau, formed in thickly bedded Lower Devonian Coeymans Limestone and thinly bedded Upper Silurian Manlius Limestone, both laid down as sediment under an ancient inland sea and later eroded into the plateau. Secret Caverns and Tory Cave, close neighbours, formed in the same beds.
The Bridal Altar is not decoration for its own sake. Couples have been married on that spot for decades, and the cave keeps a register of them running into the hundreds.
Howe Caverns sits in the hamlet of Howes Cave in Schoharie County, New York, with Secret Caverns 1.4 miles away, and the rivalry between the polished operation and the hand painted one is a genuine part of the local landscape. Tours run all year at a constant 52 degrees Fahrenheit.
Other places on the map within a couple of hours.
