Ruby Falls: The Waterfall Hidden Inside Lookout Mountain, Tennessee

Lookout Mountain, rising above Chattanooga, had long been known for a cave. Lookout Mountain Cave had a natural entrance, and for years local people explored it. Then, in 1905, construction of a railroad tunnel sealed that entrance shut. A Chattanooga chemist and cave enthusiast named Leo Lambert wanted to reopen it as a tourist attraction. His plan was to drill down to the old cave from the side of the mountain and install an elevator. He formed a company, bought land on the mountainside, and in 1928 his crew began blasting a shaft through the limestone. Partway down, the crew broke into something unexpected: a narrow opening, only about 18 inches high and 4 feet wide, leading into a cave no one knew existed. This cave had never had a natural entrance. On December 28, 1928, Lambert crawled in to explore it. After hours of crawling and climbing through the passage, he reached a waterfall pouring from the darkness into a pool deep inside the mountain. Lambert named it Ruby Falls, after his wife, Ruby. His crew kept digging and eventually reached the old Lookout Mountain Cave, the original goal, which sits about 1,120 feet below the mountain's summit. Lambert opened both caves to the public: Lookout Mountain Cave in December 1929, and Ruby Falls in June 1930, in the depths of the Great Depression. Ruby Falls was one of the first commercial caves lit with electric lights. Visitors preferred the new cave so strongly that the lower Lookout Mountain Cave closed to tours in 1935. Over the following decades, "SEE RUBY FALLS" became one of the most familiar signs in the South, painted on barn roofs and billboards for hundreds of miles. Johnny Cash and Roy Orbison even wrote a song playing on the slogan. The visitor center and cave complex were added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1985. Today, visitors still ride an elevator down through Lambert's shaft and follow the same passage he crawled through in 1928, ending at the waterfall that bears his wife's name.