The Lost Sea

The largest underground lake in the US, its far edge still unmapped

A thirteen-year-old found it. Ben Sands crawled forty feet through a tunnel about the width of a bicycle tyre, dropped into a chamber at the far end, and waded out into what turned out to be the largest underground lake in the United States and the second largest non-subglacial one in the world.

The cave around it is Craighead Caverns, between Sweetwater and Madisonville in the Tennessee foothills, roughly fifty miles south of Knoxville and 140 feet down. It takes its name from a former owner, the Cherokee chief Craighead, and the Cherokee used it as a council meeting place and as shelter. Confederate soldiers mined saltpetre here during the Civil War for gunpowder, and during Prohibition it served as a hideout for moonshiners. Besides the lake there are stalactites, stalagmites, a waterfall, and clusters of the rare spiky crystal growths called anthodites.

The strangest find came in 1939. Two cave guides, Jack Kyker and Clarence Hicks, exploring on their own time, came across fossilised bones. They took them to the men who then owned the cave, Dr W. J. Cameron and W. E. Michael of Sweetwater, who sent them to the American Museum of Natural History. They turned out to belong to a very large Pleistocene jaguar, and to an elk fawn. The palaeontologist George Gaylord Simpson came down himself in May 1940, recovered more of the jaguar, and made casts of its footprints, still pressed into the mud floor of the cave where the animal had walked.

It is a working tourist cave now, drawing something like two thousand visitors a day.