HUNTINGDON CO, Pa (WJAC) — On Monday, employees at the Lincoln Caverns discussed how the caves came to be and how tourists can help protect them.

Tour guide Mike Leonard also shared what these caves mean to the community.

Our biggest thing here, every guide will tell you, the best part of the job is the cave itself. We get to see it every day, we see new stuff all of the time. What we found from most of our tourists is they don’t just want to see it, they want to understand how it got here. What’s still going on? Is there anything they can do to protect them? This stuff has been here longer than people. Our geologist, and we explain this to people as well, says that a cubic inch in the cave takes hundreds of years to form. All of the tunnels that you’re walking through were carved out by water and carbonic acid. There is a lot of different ways that we can describe that to people. As I’m speaking right now, drips of water are falling on me. Over long, long periods of time, those drips of water are picking up little, tiny pieces of mineral. They’re bringing dirt with them, which is why a lot of the formations are brown, verses just, you know, rock, and white calcite. But basically, limestone is the rock, calcite is a mineral that is inside of it. Nature kind of dug it out, and now nature is filling it back in. So, depending on which tour we have, we always explain that, but we will explain it in different ways, depending on what kind of questions we get. It’s really, really fascinating to think about the formations being here for 350-400 million years. The cave itself, the tunnels, probably 5-10 million years. We noticed people were asking certain questions about the mineral. They wanted to get a little bit deeper into the mineral, and calcite, and just kind of understand some of the things they were seeing. Our geologist showed us something with ultraviolet light, how you can really show them the calcite in just about any room in the cave, just by using black lights. And we had such good response from it. I think that it’s our best tour. You see the cave in an entirely different way. There’s only a couple of caves in the country that have even started approaching the topic of black light, and we do experiments with it, and you just get to see the cave in a way that you’ve never seen it before.

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