Luray Caverns, Luray, Virginia

     Luray Caverns is probably the most beautiful cave in the world.

Mike among the stalactites.  How do you remember the definitions of stalactites and stalagmites?  Easy - stalactites hang tight to the cave ceiling, and stalagmites might grow tall enough to reach the ceiling some day. 

This is the fish market formation.

And these are the world's ugliest set of dentures.

This type of formation is called a drapery.  The back lighting shows how thin the rock is.

Early cave explorers got a little spooked and swore there was a haint in the cave when they came upon this white column.  That's why they named it Pluto's Ghost. 

The Great Staltactite Pipe Organ
The fact that stalactites produce musical tones was known in when the cave was discovered in 1878.  In 1956
Leland W. Sprinkle found 37 stalactites with particular tones and shaved them to perfect the sound.  This is the custom console that creates the music. 

The organ keys are wired to rubber mallets which strike the stalactites.  You can buy recordings of stalactite music.  In 2011 a band named Pepe Deluxé composed and recorded "In the Cave" using the Great Stalactite Pipe Organ.  They also produced a weird video.

This is the wishing well.  They clean out the coins from time to time and donate the money to charity.  The last collection in 2010 netted $144,194 for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation and the Shenandoah Agency on Aging.  The total amount of spare change dropped into the wishing well from the first clean-out in 1954 to the last in 2010 was $897,933.32 - just another example of how enough drops in the bucket eventually add up to something big.