"Jewel Cave National Monument." Judy L. Love. Arcadia Publishing,
Charleston, South Carolina; 2008. ISBN 987-0-7385-6198-1. Images of
America series. 6 by 9 inches, 128 pages, softbound. $21.99.
Arcadia Publishing can really churn them out. Its Images of American
series numbers more than forty-four hundred titles, from Abbeville
County to Zippo Company. Earlier cave numbers are "Mammoth Cave and
the Kentucky Cave Region" and "Wind Cave National Park: The First 100
Years," both published in 2003. All are in basically the same format,
with brief introductory text followed by black-and-white photos on a
historical theme with short-paragraph captions, adding up to 128 pages.
Jewel Cave, while it was discovered in 1900, only about twenty years
later than Wind Cave, doesn't really have a lot of early history
compared to the other two caves featured in these books, because it
was pretty much ignored until the 1960s, although it had been declared
a national monument in 1908. The serious exploration by Herb and Jan
Conn and later Mike Wiles and their companions that led to Jewel
Cave's becoming the second-longest cave in the world began at that
time, and the serious development of a modern cave tour didn't start
until the middle sixties, with the current visitors center and
elevators opening in 1972. Previously, only lantern tours from the
natural entrance of a small part of the cave were available. As a
result, less than 20 percent of the photographs are from before 1959,
so this book is less interesting to the speleo historian than the
Mammoth Cave and Wind Cave books. On the other hand, the modern
exploration of the cave is well documented by photographs by cavers,
especially David Schnute, and a considerable percentage of the
pictures show cavers in the wild parts of the cave and some of its
unusual formations, such as logomites and hydromagnesite balloons,
that are not on the tour. The photographs, one or two per page, are
well printed, although a couple of unsharp ones would have looked
better smaller. There are some errors in geology in a couple of
captions, but generally the captions, along with the introduction, add
up to a nice account of Jewel Cave.--Bill Mixon
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