DeSoto Caverns

Childersburg, Alabama

Spectacular laser light and sound show with leaping waters inside the Great Onyx Cathedral -- larger than a football field and higher than a 12-story building! Prehistoric Indian Habitat and Burial Ground over 2,000 years old! Confederate gunpowder mining center! Meet "Happy Hernando," Spanish Explorer and living cartoon mascot! Test your explorer skills in the primitive weapons arcade and the 3/4 acre wood paneled maze. Shoot water balloons from a Spanish Fort or Indian Teepee! -- Desoto Caverns brochure

Outdoor maze: In olden times, a cave tour was enough.

Modern cave attractions know that a big hole in the ground just isn't enough anymore. DeSoto goes a little overboard with the above-ground entertainments, but the place does have kiddie appeal. You can, pan for gold, run around the maze, watch a blacksmith in action... but we're here to see the cave and the 2000-year old jawbone of a seven-foot tall Woodland Indian.

On the gift shop porch, ticket-holders take up position for the next guided tour. They wait nervously, uneasily -- like POWs piling up at the German train station in The Great Escape. A young female guide appears; sadly, not wearing the Happy Hernando cartoon mascot suit. She leads our crowd of trailer families, redneck newlyweds, and Yankee tourists through a 145-foot-long corrugated metal tunnel. It was blasted into the side of the hill in 1994 to ease access, and apparently collapsed a rock wall above.

The cave is mostly one immense room -- the Great Onyx Cathedral Room -- with dim lights (electricity was not added until 1965) accenting large columns, frozen Niagaras, and stalactites that have not been broken off. Where's that giant jawbone? The honest tour guide explains in warm 'bama tones that there were enough Indian bones found in one spot to reconstruct five adults and one child. But... "The university took 'em and won't give 'em back. The cave owners are tryin' to get 'em back, to bury 'em proper."

The guide points out that the cave waterfall was built by the cave owners, but experts believe that one was once here, and that this is what it would have looked like. In the wishing well, three resident fish with perfectly normal eyesight were bought at Walmart. They aren't blind as a result of living in the cave -- "but their offspring would be." The moonshine still was bought from the Jack Daniels distillery in Tennessee, but it helps simulate the period of time that the cavern was also a tavern named The Bloody Bucket. There was a dance floor and a live band. Patrons used to get sloshed and shoot stalactites off the ceiling, explaining the stubby remnants we view today.

As a finale, tour groups sit on wet log benches in the center of the big room and watch a light show. It's the usual pre-recorded paraphrasing of the Book of Genesis, spoken by a guy who must do radio spots for car dealerships and monster truck rallies. "On the seventh day, God looked around, and saw that his work was done. He rested." Illuminated fountains spritz into the air, lasers arc delicately through pumped-in mist, white spotlights blast erratically. The 1812 overture blares from speakers.

All in all, not a bad way to spend a hot afternoon.

In case you were wondering, Spanish explorer DeSoto did not discover the cave -- the guide says locals call it Cowamug Cave -- but he did pass through the area, making Childersburg the oldest continually inhabited city in the USA.