Exploring Raccoon Mountain Caverns in Chattanooga, Tennessee

This post may contain affiliate links, view our disclosure policy for details.

Isn’t this ABSOLUTELY AMAZING!? We visited Raccoon Mountain Caverns yesterday in Chattanooga, Tennessee and this was just one of many beautiful views that we saw while exploring some of their local caves.

This is one of my favorite pictures but as you’ll see below there were many beautiful things to see! It’s very difficult for me to get good pictures because of the lighting in the caves but I was just absolutely stunned when I saw how amazing these pictures in Raccoon Mountain turned out!! I didn’t even have to buy any postcards 😉

When we first entered the cave they had this cool display of lanterns set up. Raccoon Mountain Caverns offers an incredible amount of wild expedition tours, overnight stays in the cave, and other absolutely incredible things that I would have just been elated to do. However having our 2 younger kids on our road trip and recovering from abdominal surgery just did not allow me the opportunity to do any type of cave crawls or other expeditions.

WOW! I can hardly stop looking at these pictures and I was IN the caves! Isn’t that incredible? Just down the road was Ruby Falls which is the iconic & desired tourist location for many Americans, including myself, but to be honest I extremely and thoroughly enjoyed Raccoon Mountain.

If we ever have the opportunity to come back to Chattanooga it is Raccoon Mountain that I will be visiting. There were only 2 other people with us on our cave tour and it is a more rustic experience than the highly commercialized Ruby Falls. Not to mention that as you can see there are some stunning formations!

There were plenty of tunnels, nooks and crannies that I secretly wish I could have just got lost in for the day!

As I’m extremely short on time since we’re on the road again today I wanted to share this one last photo with you. Above you see what is called a cave shield – there are only 60 caves in the world that have been documented which have these and this is the only one in Tennessee. (information I learned from our tour guide)

I need to research this phenomenon a little more after our trip and update this post but it is a formation due to rain water dripping down in a certain manner and is only attached by a small area on the right side of the shield. Pretty neat huh?

I LOVE kids and I was thrilled to be able to expose my kids to something that many kids just read about in a book! There were only 3 types of animals that live in the front part of the cave where we went into and my son found 2 of the 3 species by himself!! Check out this cool cave salamander we spotted on our exploration.

You can also see what we thought of Ruby Falls, also in Chattanooga Tennessee, right down the road.

Share with your friends!

Similar Posts