ShowCaveBlog

Smoke Hole Caverns is located in West Virginia, U.S.A.. Lately it has been the target of an arsonist. The first fire burned on the evening of 10-NOV-2009 and destroyed the apartment area above the restaurant. The second fire on 11-NOV-2009 at 5:00 in the morning destroyed the building housing the restaurant and gift shop. Items found in a trash can, which was also set on fire, are evidence that the fires were set deliberately.
The cave itself remains open, although there is no restaurant and gift shop any more.
Fires at W.Va. cave attraction ruled arson

Showcaves.com is now 15 years online. The first descriptions of caves and the collection of useful information was made around 1990 by Jochen Duckeck, first for the new show caves in eastern Germany, which became accessible after the border was opend in November 1989.
The first idea to publish a guidebook was never realized: printing books was expensive and impossible to finance by a student. The first online version was created in 1994 with the tool latex2html from the original LaTeX book. So actually showcaves.com went online 15 years ago.
In this early times it was hosted on the webserver of the FORWISS in Erlangen, the company where Jochen Duckeck worked at this time. It listed 55 show caves in Germany and started with the first caves in other countries.
In 1995 the site was hosted by the new company of Jochen Duckeck, the small internet company mediatec. Finally in 1998 the website was moved to bubis.com, and 2002 it got its own domain showcaves.com, hosted by domainfactory. And that is where it is hosted until today.
Today showcaves.com lists almost 3,500 underground tourist sites or subterranea, including show caves, show mines, cellars, bunkers, tunnels and much more.

After our last blog some minutes ago, we mentioned that there was no entry since July, almost half a year without show cave news. Actually we are not dead, the site is still maintained and the blog still lives. However there was not a single story which fit into this blog all this time.

Not long ago we made a page about a new cave in the U.S.A. which was developed as a show cave and promised to become a great cave. We added comments about the difficulties to book a tour during the first years. And now it celebrates its tenth anniversary.
We were impressed how long ago this cave was opened, and started to check how old showcaves.com is. We will post a blog entry about this soon.
However, our congratulations to Kartchner Cavern which seems to be not only an impressive cave, but also a successful example of nature awareness and careful cave management.