Ruby Falls: The Underground Waterfall Inside Lookout Mountain

Inside Lookout Mountain, one hundred forty-five feet below the surface, a waterfall drops one hundred forty-five feet through the interior of the earth. No one outside a small exploration party knew it existed until nineteen twenty-eight.

Leo Lambert was a chemist and cave enthusiast who had grown up hearing about a natural cave on Lookout Mountain that had been sealed off when the railroad drilled a tunnel through the mountain in nineteen oh five. He formed the Lookout Mountain Cave Company, purchased land above the site, and began drilling a new elevator shaft to reach the old cavern and open it to tourists.

Several weeks into the project, at a depth of two hundred sixty feet, Lambert's crew broke through the ceiling of a void and felt a rush of cold air escape through the opening. Lambert organized a small party, lowered himself into the darkness, and spent seventeen hours crawling through passages, squeezing through tight formations, and wading through underground streams. At the end of that journey, his lantern illuminated a cascade of water pouring down one hundred forty-five feet through an underground chamber, pooling in a basin on the cavern floor.

He named the waterfall after his wife, Ruby.

Lambert opened Ruby Falls to the public in nineteen thirty, making it one of the first commercial caves in the country to be fitted with electric lighting. The original cave he had intended to rediscover turned out to be accessible through a separate section of the shaft, and it too was opened as a tourist attraction. Ruby Falls became the draw, and it has remained the more famous of the two ever since.

Today roughly four hundred thousand visitors a year make the elevator descent through solid rock to stand beside the waterfall that Leo Lambert found by accident on a dark November night nearly a century ago.