Lost River - Karst Information Portal

cave passages ranging in altitude from 460 to
580 feet (Frushour and Komisarcik, 2002)
while the nearby Blue River flows at about 390
feet above sea level. The entrance to the cave is
at 575 feet in altitude and is stratigraphically
in the lower part of the Paoli Limestone, as are
the ceilings of Odd Fellows Hall and the ceiling
above Monument Mountain, two of the larger
rooms in the cave. The remainder of the known
passages is entirely within the Ste. Genevieve
Limestone, but there are indications that some
of these passages have deep alluvial materials
and may be developed as deep as the upper part
of the St. Louis Limestone. Richard L. Powell
(1968) indicated that a large passage, now likely
alluvium-filled, of early to middle Pleistocene
age may lie at grade with the deep channel of
The Geology of Wyandotte Cave
Blue River. The reasoning was that collapse
at The House of Representatives, Monument
Mountain, and Odd Fellows Hall resulted in
large rooms with too little volume of rubble
for the volume of void in the rooms. It is also
plausible that streams in the passages were able
to dissolve and erode enough rock to make way
for additional collapse rock. There is no real
evidence for a large alluvium-filled lower level.
Four major factors have controlled
orientation and the evolution of the passage
levels of Wyandotte Cave: bedrock joint
pattern, piezometric slope, lithology, and
geomorphic history of the area. The cave
consists of a series of sub-parallel passages that
trend from the northeast to the southwest,
generally following the local dip of the
The physiographic regions of southern Indiana and the location of Wyandotte Cave. The Crawford Upland,
Mitchell Plateau, and Muscatatuck Plateau are regions with karst features (modified from Gray, 2000).
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