Tennessee Is Home To A Bottomless Lake And You’ll Want To See It For Yourself
By Meghan Kraft|Published May 03, 2019
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Meghan Kraft
Author
Meghan Kraft loves to travel the world, but she makes her home right here in Nashville, Tennessee. She holds a degree in English, and has worked in the digital marketing realm with companies such as Apartments.com, USA Today and HarperCollins Publishing.
There’s really no such thing as a “bottomless” lake, right? of course, it has to stop somewhere. The waterways don’t simply bleed through the layers of the earth, fizzing and popping their way through the mantle layer all the way to the heated core of the planet. Though “bottomless” is quite a substantial term, what if the lake begins below the earth’s surface? The Lost Sea Adventure is located in Sweetwater, Tennessee, and though it may not be bottomless (is anything really?), it begins below and stretches deep. Care to take a visit with us?
The Lost Sea Adventure now operates as a family attraction, a neat tourist destination that takes folks deep beneath the Tennessee surface to a subterranean cave network with an underground lake.
Known as one of the largest underground lakes in the world, Craighead Caverns, the cave system that boasts The Lost Sea, is known for its extensive breadth beneath the ground. It's also applauded for the crystal clusters of anthodites, the stalagmites and stalactites that are found throughout.
The caverns were first used by Native Americans, the first people in the area, and the caverns are named after the Cherokee Chief Craighead. During his time in Tennessee, the caverns were used as a meeting place for and by the Cherokee, later mined by Confederate soldiers during the Civil War.
The Lost Sea was discovered in 1905 by 13-year-old Ben Sands. He was playing in one of the caves of Craighead Caverns, when he crawled through a small opening and found himself in an expansive room filled with water. The lake itself measures 800 feet long and 220 feet wide at full capacity.
Although Dragon's Breath Cave in Namibia is now the largest underground cave in the world, The Lost Sea does come in at a tight second. You can now take boat tours across the water and marvel at the intense clarity and beauty of this expanse of water beneath the state.
Take a look at this incredible place via the video below – it’s almost unbelievable!
Continue to explore the beauty of Tennessee with a visit to its wild, middle-of-nowhere spaces. You’ll forget folks live here at all!
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