Lost World Caverns: The Thirty-Ton Chandelier

Beneath the farms of Greenbrier County, West Virginia, lies a cave that local farmers once used as a convenient dumping ground for dead livestock. Today it is one of the most visited underground spaces in Appalachia.

The cave was first recorded in nineteen forty-two under the name Grapevine Cave. For years the only way in was a vertical hole, which made it more useful for disposal than for exploration. In the early nineteen seventies, workers dug a proper walk-in entrance through the hillside. Inside they found a main chamber about a thousand feet long and up to one hundred twenty feet high, decorated with calcite formations built up over millions of years as this valley was slowly lifted from an ancient sea.

The showpiece is a compound stalactite called the Snowy Chandelier, estimated to weigh thirty tons, believed to be one of the largest formations of its kind in the country. In nineteen sixty-seven, explorers also found the bones of a prehistoric short-faced bear, a creature extinct for roughly eleven thousand years, preserved in the cave's constant fifty-two-degree air.