By WILL PERKINS
Glasgow News 1
The Green River Ferry at Mammoth Cave National Park will remain closed for several months while repairs are being planned and implemented. The ferry closed in April after historic flooding caused damage to navigational cables.
During her parks report at the Cave City Tourist and Convention Commission meeting Monday afternoon, Molly Schroer, public information officer for the national park, said they are having architects and engineers look at the ferry’s infrastructure to see what can be repaired and what needs to be replaced.
“We hope to get it open as quickly as possible,” she said. “But it’s going to be several months to repair.”
Schroer reported that Mammoth Cave had 43,189 visitors on cave tours in April, which was 13 percent less than in April of last year. She said the historic flooding played a role in the drop.
“We were able to redirect people to other parts of the cave, but it did affect our visitation,” Schroer said of the flooding. “Those numbers were partly affected by that.
“A lot depends on where Spring Break hits and our schedules that we have out.”
Cave tour operations have been released through June 14, and the park is adding additional guided tours and opening up more tour dates “as soon as we’re able to confidently finalize the schedule,” Schroer said. “The park had to temporarily suspend lantern tours during April due to a faulty cave lock, but now we are able to offer those again.
“We are still offering the Extended Discovery (tour) every day, which gets a lot of people in the cave and it’s been very popular — especially with people with small kids, which is great.”
Even though April’s numbers were down, Schroer said the park is optimistic about increased visitation in recent weeks.
“It seems like we’re busy again,” she said.
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