Ruby Falls

Ruby Falls is an 85 foot waterfall 1,120 feet inside Lookout Mountain, and the story of how anybody found it is better than the falls themselves.

The limestone was laid down between about 300 and 360 million years ago, in the Carboniferous, when a shallow sea covered eastern Tennessee. Around 200 million years ago the whole area was uplifted to form Lookout Mountain and the ridges around it, and after that slightly acidic groundwater worked down through cracks in the rock, widening them into passages. Two caves resulted. Lookout Mountain Cave had a natural entrance to the surface. Ruby Falls Cave, higher in the mountain, had none at all.

That is the crucial detail. There was no way in. When the railway drove a tunnel through the mountain in 1905 it sealed the natural entrance of the lower cave, and in 1928 Leo Lambert set out to reopen it by sinking an elevator shaft. On the way down the drill broke into a void nobody knew existed: the sealed upper cave. Lambert crawled the narrow passage, found the waterfall at the end of it, and named it after his wife Ruby. The upper cave turned out to be the commercial proposition; the lower one, which he had actually been digging for, was not.

The two were later joined as Lookout Mountain Caverns. Ruby Falls Cave carries the decoration the lower cave lacks: stalactites and stalagmites, columns, drapery and flowstone.

Access is by lift, then a paved trail to the falls, on a guided tour only. It sits inside Chattanooga city limits, which makes it one of the most accessible show caves in the country.