I’ve finally learned to take passable snapshots in caves. While visiting Branson, I took the tour of Marvel Cave, which begins with a long walk down steel stairs and then passage along a trail to the bottom of the enormous Cathedral Room, where I caught an image of a man and woman holding hands in front of a formation called The Sentinel.

The guide was happy to regale us with certain size comparisons, such as that the fact that the Statue of Liberty, not counting the pedestal, would fit easily in the Cathedral Room. I had to check that later, and sure enough, the Cathedral Room is 204 feet high, while the statue is 151 feet high. The room is large enough to accommodate hot air balloons in flight, and in 1963 balloonist Don Piccard set the “underground altitude record” in the room. The guide also said that someone stood on top of a hot air balloon once and touched the ceiling of the room, probably the only person ever to touch it.

Marvel Cave is the original Branson-area tourist attraction. Tours began in the 1890s, after the commercial uses of the cave, namely the extraction of bat guano, had played out. That’s older than the area’s many theaters, museums, and other attractions, older than massive local lake built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, older even than The Shepherd of the Hills, the 1907 book that inadvertently encouraged travelers to come to the Ozarks. Silver Dollar City, which is on the surface directly above the cave, owes its existence to the fact that people were coming there anyway—a theme park ought to work on the site, and it has. It opened in 1960, during the immediate post-Disneyland boom time for theme parks.

The cave’s bats must be hibernating already, since we didn’t see or hear any. White nose syndrome hasn’t reached Missouri yet, and we were warned not to enter the cave wearing any clothes worn in caves with infected bats, since the fungus that apparently causes the disease is thought to travel that way.

Marvel Cave offered up one of the more difficult walks I’ve ever taken in a cave, or maybe I’m just getting old. The paths are slippery in places, and not all the stairs are even. The ceiling comes down to meet your head in a lot of spots, especially one called Tall Man’s Headache. The walk down was easy enough, but the climb up involved a lot of stairs, though the last part of the tour involves being taken out of the cave by a short cable railroad.

But it was worth the exertion. It isn’t the largest or the most feature-packed commercial cave I’ve ever toured, but it’s an impressive one with a range of pretty features, only a few of which include the use of colored lights.