Skyline Caverns: The Cave That Named Its Own Crystal

Just outside Front Royal, below the northern entrance to Skyline Drive, a retired geologist named Walter Amos went looking for a cave in December of nineteen thirty-seven. He found one, and what he found inside earned it a place in geology textbooks.

Skyline Caverns holds one of the rarest speleothem formations in the world: anthodites, white needle-like crystals that radiate outward in starburst clusters from cave walls and ceilings. Skyline Caverns is one of the best places in the country to see them. The largest known specimen, called the Chandelier, is eighteen inches long and still growing. The cavern itself formed over roughly fifty to sixty million years in tilted limestone, and it maintains a constant temperature of fifty-four degrees year-round. It opened as a public attraction in nineteen thirty-nine, timed deliberately to coincide with the crowds Skyline Drive was already pulling to this corner of the Blue Ridge.