Ruby Falls

an iconic attraction in Chattanooga

Hope you had a great holiday season and 2024 is treating you well. The next few posts will be focused on a trip from November. My friend, Angie has been wanting to go to Savannah for a while and I promised her we would go when she retired from her career as a school nurse. It is worth noting that Angie and I have been good friends for 44 years and met at Girl Scout Camp. We agreed that November would be a good time to go and then I started mapping out routes and realized we needed a nice stop along the way. I also found that Savannah was very expensive on the weekend but much more affordable Sunday-Friday. So we ended up with a trip that would give us a weekend to spend in Chattanooga, Tennessee. My wife was on board with the trip and we all knew that Kismet would be coming along.

We stayed at an Airbnb which was a good choice and hit the ground running on our first day and went to Ruby Falls. What a beautiful cave and a really informative tour.

The history of the cave was quite interesting. Ruby Falls Cave has no natural openings. In 1905, the natural entrance to Lookout Mountain Cave was closed during the construction of a railway tunnel. In the 1920s, a chemist and cave enthusiast named Leo Lambert thought that he could re-open the cave as a tourist attraction. So his company purchased land above Lookout Mountain Cave and began to drill through the limestone. They discovered a small passageway about 18 inches high and four feet wide and eventually discovered the hidden cave and its waterfall. On his next trip to visit the cave, Lambert took his wife Ruby, and told her that he would name the falls after her.

You can see that I am wearing my Mammoth Cave shirt, something from the 2022 fall RV trip where we visited this iconic national park. I love visiting caves and may do a compare and contrast cave post one of these days.