You’re about 140 feet underground when all the lights go out, and the atmosphere begins to seize your senses.

The air is 54 degrees and heavy, as it always is. When you inhale it’s like smelling rain from inside a basement—fresh and stale at the same time. Reaching out to your left you feel a cool, slick rock formation with drops of water sliding languidly down the side. The darkness is immense, seemingly endless in a cave, especially in Luray Caverns, the largest cave of its kind in the East. But even in the middle of a cathedral-like cavern with the lights out you can feel the embrace of the walls, covered in dripstone and flecked with bubbling carbon dioxide.

Your guide reaches around you and presses a button on a small electrical box perched beside a stalagmite, and suddenly the array of colors and formations around you—lining the ceiling, the cave walls, even the floor—come to life. The experience probably isn’t unlike what discoverer Andrew Campbell, a tinsmith, and his three companions experienced the morning of August 13, 1878, when a cold air blast from a limestone sinkhole blew out one of their candles. The foursome then dug away at loose rock for several hours until Campbell was able to shimmy into the hole and slide down a rope, still clutching his candle, which illuminated the caverns below. Seeing for the first time the eerie and inexplicable world of limestone stalactites and stalagmites led to the discovery of one of the more distinctive treasures on the East Coast.

Alive and Kicking
Luray Caverns, which was designated as a U.S. natural landmark in 1974, is known as much for the incredible array of colors in the rock formations as for its size. The stalactites and stalagmites (“stalactites are on the ceiling, stalagmites on the ground,” my guide, Bob, simplifies) that cover the surrounding caverns range in shade and shape from spindly ginger-colored formations that jut down from the ceiling to white coral-like giants that have mushroomed from the floor. They share one common bond—the span of the ages it took for them to evolve into their current state.

Luray Caverns is considered an “active cave,” which means that new deposits accumulate and the rock formations continue to change, but at a rate of one cubic inch per 120 years, even regular visitors shouldn’t hold their breath to witness a major change. There are a few stalagmites that appear to have toppled over with the intensity of a fallen Giant Sequoia, but Bob says the popular thinking is that the caverns would survive an earthquake in spite of their brittle appearance. “But we don’t have those here, anyway,” he assures.

Most caves—and there are hundreds throughout the United States alone—result from the combination of limestone and an acidic mixture of water, which can be produced by rainwater that picks up carbonic acid when it seeps through decaying vegetation. Most of Luray’s sister caves that formed in the Appalachian Mountain range, which runs from Maine to Georgia, contain a thick layer of limestone.

In the Shenandoah Valley alone there are seven cave systems within a 200-mile radius. In many cases it’s the region’s topography that determines the physical makeup and coloring of the cave. “Some caves out in the West [such as] Carlsbad are more than 1,000 feet deep. So the rainwater can very easily get 60 feet and take along with it the minerals that color those formations,” says John Shaffer, director of public relations at Luray.

Luray, which is 160 feet at its deepest point, is unique for its rich array of colors—reds, yellows, deep oranges, and even some blues. Shaffer attributes that to the fact that the cave is located so close to the surface in a place where the water solution can reach the limestone so easily.

However, other regions of the country and the world are populated with caves that have different attributes altogether. Fantastic Caverns, a ride-through cave in Springfield, Mo., has several thriving species of wildlife that live in the cave including Ozarks cavefish, cave crayfish, and grotto salamander, which are white and blind from being shielded from natural light for so many generations. Bluespring Caverns in Bedford, Ind., which also has living animals in and around the caverns, can only be discovered by boat tour as it formed along the White River.

The Air Down There
A tour guide ahead is pointing out to a crowd of about 15 people a particular rock formation. “Do you see the alligator? See the head and the teeth, the tail?” The group takes in the jagged edges of the particular rock shapes that appear to form a large animal, maybe an alligator or a giant lizard, but they’re particularly impressed when he tells them that a dozen or so movies and televisions shows have been filmed down in the caverns. Ripley’s Believe it Or Not, Good Morning America, Mister Rogers Neighborhood, and, most recently, National Geographic used Luray as a setting for their Halloween specials.

The heart of the caverns is, and has been since it opened to tourists in 1878, a setting for more than 300 weddings. Most of the weddings are held in the area of the cavern called the Cathedral Room, which has the largest floor space of any room in the cave. On Illumination Days and for some weddings 5,000 candles are lit around the Cathedral.

“It used to be back in the ’40s and ’50s that we’d have weddings down there all the time. I just read a local article in our weekly paper with a photo of someone who was married in the cave in 1917,” Shaffer says. Although they used to have the weddings and the reception in the caverns for fun, Shaffer says they now treat marriage ceremonies as part of their business. “Now people have weddings in all sorts of places—a cavern or on top of a mountain or in an airplane. We do it for profit. We charge a $600 fee for use of the room for four hours. It’s another means of income. With the natural landmark status, park services inspect us once a year to make sure we’re not doing anything to harm the ecosystem or harm the structure itself. Things like receptions would harm the environment down there and it would be very hard to cater something down there.”

Beyond the occasional wedding, the Cathedral Room holds one of Luray Caverns’s greatest treasures. More than three acres of stalactites are wired to produce sound from The Great Stalacpipe Organ, which is recorded in the Guinness Book of World Records as being the world’s largest natural musical instrument. The idea began simply enough: A mathematician and electronic scientist from Virginia named Leland W. Sprinkle witnessed a group during a tour in 1954 tapping on the stalactites and producing various sounds. He began a three-year project selecting formations that would produce an accurate musical scale. Now, when a key on the organ is pressed a sound occurs as a rubber-tipped mallet taps the appropriate stalactite somewhere in the mile-and-a-quarter-long cave.

Challenging Tourism
Although the attraction brings in half a million visitors every year, Shaffer says Luray Caverns is constantly working to increase tourism numbers. The last year and a half has been particularly challenging as a result of regional and national events that had heavy media coverage. Beyond the tourism plummet after September 11 and economic hardship throughout the year, the most disturbing event for regional tourism was the sniper attacks that terrorized the Washington, D.C. area for three weeks in October of last year. During that period, schools in the area discontinued most after school activities and cancelled or postponed most field trips to protect their students. “We lost about 3,000 people in a 10-day period,” Shaffer says. “Many of those were inbound people into the Washington area. One that sticks in my mind is a series of groups from Michigan that just did not come for fear that the school system would not let them travel into the Washington area because you had the lockdown situation. The students who ordinarily come here from the area did not come out.”

Shaffer says there were days when not a single person visited the caverns, but the attraction has rebounded nicely. “The morning of the apprehension of the suspects we started getting calls re-booking even before arrests were made. So we hope that that continues. We hope we can salvage some of it, anyway,” he says. One way Luray Caverns continues to market itself is by building other attractions onsite to give visitors a reason to stay longer and spend more money. Shaffer says one downfall of commercial caves from a tourism standpoint is that the whole tour only takes an hour or so.

“We’re trying to provide more opportunity for people to stay longer. The longer they stay the more money they spend. We are not an all-day attraction the way a Six Flags would be. Our tour lasts only one hour,” he explains. “But we do see the advantages of providing other opportunities for people while they’re here.” One of the most recent examples is the Garden Maze that Luray Caverns added to its premises last year. The trees in the Garden Maze are eight feet tall and four feet wide and are enhanced with a misting fog at strategic locations to provide a mystical effect. The conundrum of the twisting pathways leads adventurers past fountains and into a cave. Shaffer says the maze complemented Luray Caverns’s landmark status and kept with the theme of
environmental education.

There are three other major attractions on the grounds including the Historic Car and Carriage Caravan Museum, Luray Singing Towers (containing 47 bells including one that weighs 7,640 pounds), and Caverns Country Club Resort. However, Shaffer says the staff won’t add rides or games because they want to maintain their identity but still manage to bring new visitors. “We don’t want to be like a theme park because we are not a theme park. We are a natural wonder with a designation from the Department of Interior. We try to do things here that are educational in nature.”

The Wishing Well
Toward the end of the tour, after passing Saracen’s Tent—a large formation that resembles towels hanging neatly in a row, one of the most perfectly formed drapery structures in the world—and gazing in the 20-inch-deep Dream Lake that mirrors the rock formations above, visitors reach the shimmering Wishing Well. Said to be one of the most productive wishing wells in the world, the pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, and coinage from around the world add up to roughly $32,000 a year, which is donated to various charities. More than $400,000 was donated from 1954 to 1994.

But beyond the profit Luray Caverns generates, Shaffer, who was born and raised in Luray, says the attraction brings something irreplaceable to the area. “We live in such a small town and it’s such an asset to our community and to the citizens. If you drive downtown today—it’s a small town, about 5,000 people—you’d find a lawyer from Manhattan, you’ll probably find someone from South Korea, someone from England, someone from Tennessee. We have such a cosmopolitan opportunity with people all over the world gathered in this small town in Virginia,” he says.

Shaffer first toured Luray Caverns when he was in fifth grade. Since that time he has visited the cave hundreds of times, and he says he tries not to become immune to the caverns’s exceptional beauty. “I go down there all the time. You always see things and get down there where it’s quiet; a photographer is setting up a shoot and you think, this cannot be real. But it is. And I still enjoy the time that I spend down there. “I’ve been down there with flashlights. Maybe I won’t be totally alone but it’s a very isolating feeling when you’re walking for a quarter of a mile in pure darkness with only the light that you have.”