Crystal Caverns Mine

Crystal Caverns Mine. How Strata Shaped Strategy: The Hupp's Hill Civil War/Karst Interpretive Walking Trail. , You are standing approximately 45 feet above the Crystal Caverns Mine, a chamber that once produced calcite crystals, as well as saltpeter, the chief component, of black gunpowder. Early gunpowder works utilized a low-tech production method that required enormous amounts of organic waste. Saltpeter crystals formed on copper rods that were inserted into vats of boiling fertilizer brine. Since enormous amounts of fertilizer are available in caves where roosting bats excrete guano, many bat caves were badly damaged during Civil War mining operations. Luckly, Crystal Caverns escaped this fate because it housed a small bat colony that produced little guano. Today, because Crystal Caverns' four throats (openings to the subsurface have been sealed, bats no longer inhabit the show cave, but the flying mammals do roost in the Hill's trees. Hupp's Hill is a protected bat habitat., Crystal Caverns' remaining inhabitant is a tiny endangered species of amphibod. Stygobromus hubbardi is a white, eyeless, shrimp-like creatures that lives only in Hupp's Hill cave system, nowhere else in the world. Nicknamed Any in honor of a young Civil War drummer boy reputedly killed on Hupp's Hill during the 1864 Valley Campaign, "Andy the Amphipod's" population is carefully monitored and his home preserved for the viability of his species., Crystal Caverns, the most historic of the Shenandoah Valley's eight show caves, was the first documented Virginia cave. The Hupp's Hill caves are but three of the thousands honeycombed beneath the Valley floor. This interpretive walking trail is the northern trail head of the Virginia Cave and Karst Trail network.