A bit off the beaten path about 11 miles west of Boerne, TX is an awesome cave called Cave Without a Name. The cave was discovered when a small farm animal fell into a shaft. Nobody knew how large the cave was and it was largely ignored until prohibition when a still was hidden in it.
Cave Without a Name, you ask - why call it that? The cave was first explored when some brave (or a little crazy) young boys sent down an 80 foot sink hole. The ranch owner found out about the cave and decided to commercialize it - a little. When looking for a name, the owner held a contest to name the cave. Apparently, some young kid said that the cave was too pretty to have a name, hence Cave Without a Name.
Cave Without a name isn't like many other caves in Central Texas. Caves like Natural Bridge Cavern and Inner Space Cavern are much more commercialized and marketed. Cave Without a Name is rural enough and not marketed, so it doesn't get hardly the traffic that other caves get. What this means is that tour groups are generally smaller and visitors can interact more with the tour guides.
The man-made entrance to the cave is a series of switchbacks made up of 126 stairs. The bottom of the stairs is actually the bottom of the sink hole and visitors need to duck to walk under the entrance, which probably has about a 5 foot ceiling. From there, the tour takes visitors through 4 very large rooms. Visitors to Cave Without a Name will see huge flowstone formations, rimstone pools, incredible cave bacon, huge columns and a helictite that looks remarkably like a chicken's foot.
Learn more and get directions to Cave Without a Name. Click on any image to enlarge it. All photos taken by my brother, Cal Chapman, who owns and operates Chapman Engineering in Boerne, TX.
Want to see more amazing cave formations? Visit my Caverns of Sonora Photos page.
|