Tuckaleechee Caverns run underneath Great Smoky Mountains National Park, with their entrance in Townsend, Tennessee, and they are rated by the AAA as the largest and highest rated cavern east of the Mississippi.
The Cherokee used them in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They were found again in the mid nineteenth century by men working at a local sawmill, and Earl McCampbell opened them for tours in 1931. That venture lasted a single year before the Great Depression closed it. The caverns stayed shut for two decades until two Townsend locals, Bill Vananda and Harry Myers, reopened them in 1953. For the first two years visitors went through by kerosene lamp, and electric light was not wired in until 1955.
The headline feature is Silver Falls, a two-tier underground waterfall of 210 feet, reached at the far end of the tour. The cave system itself originates at White Oak Sinks, inside the national park.
The caverns hold something else that has nothing to do with tourism. Deep inside is SeismicTKL, a seismograph system monitored by the United States Department of Defense and the United States Geological Survey, and described as the most sensitive seismograph system on Earth. The mountain above it damps out the surface noise that would swamp such an instrument anywhere else, which is precisely why it is here.
The tour is guided, runs about an hour and a quarter, and is a there-and-back walk on a paved path with a good many steps. The cave holds a steady temperature in the mid fifties Fahrenheit whatever the Smokies are doing outside, and Townsend makes an easy base for the quiet end of the national park.
Other places on the map within a couple of hours.
