Ruby Falls and the Cave Leo Lambert Found for His Wife

Three hundred to three hundred sixty million years ago, this part of Tennessee was under a shallow inland sea. The sediment from that sea compressed into limestone, and over millions of years, slightly acidic groundwater worked through cracks in the stone, widening them slowly into passages. Lookout Mountain is riddled with caves. Most of them have never been named.

In nineteen oh five, the original entrance to Lookout Mountain Cave was sealed during the construction of a railway tunnel. In the nineteen twenties, a chemist and cave enthusiast named Leo Lambert believed he could re-open the cave as a tourist attraction. His company acquired land on the mountainside and in nineteen twenty-eight began drilling an elevator shaft through the limestone to reach the old cave at depth.

While drilling, Lambert's crew broke into an unexpected narrow passage, only about eighteen inches high and four feet wide. Lambert squeezed through. What he found at the end of it, after roughly a mile of exploring, was an underground waterfall that no human being had ever seen before. It dropped eighty-five feet in a vertical shaft. He named it after his wife Ruby.

The Ruby Falls cave opened to the public in nineteen thirty. It has been continuously attracting visitors ever since. The water that feeds the falls is rainwater percolating down through the limestone from the mountain's surface. It collects in a pool at the base of the falls and eventually makes its way through the mountain to emerge at a spring on the Tennessee River shore. The eighty-five-foot drop happens in complete underground darkness, which is why the cave's operators eventually installed dramatic colored lighting over the falls. Leo Lambert thought a waterfall was worth finding. He was right.