Skyline Caverns and the Orchids of Stone
Near Front Royal, Virginia
Just south of Front Royal, near the entrance to Skyline Drive, a stairway descends into one of the strangest caves in America. Skyline Caverns was not found by luck. In nineteen thirty seven, a retired geologist named Walter Amos, who had been hired to look for show caves that could draw visitors alongside the new Skyline Drive, studied the surface of the land itself, reading the shapes of the hills and hollows, and predicted a cavern lay beneath.
On the seventeenth of December that year, he was proven right. Clearing away roughly fourteen inches of mud and clay that coated the cavern floor, Amos and his crew broke into a sealed chamber, and there they found the treasure that makes this cave famous. Clinging to the ceiling were anthodites, delicate white spikes of calcium carbonate that radiate outward in clusters like frozen bursts of needles.
They are so beautiful they are called the orchids of the mineral kingdom, and they grow at an almost unimaginably slow rate, reportedly about one inch every seven thousand years. Skyline Caverns is described as one of the few places in the world with anthodite formations. The crystals are so rare and fragile that they are protected by Virginia law and kept behind doors a guide must open.
The caverns opened to visitors in nineteen thirty nine and welcome travelers still.
