Real underground riding: The Louisville Mega Cavern Bike Park

When the popularity of BMX and mountain bike riding fades, the true riders go underground.  Or when it's raining in Kentucky.  This is the bike park that was in the Louisville Mega Cavern.

Since BMX and mountain biking have grown in popularity over the last 40 years, bike parks have sprung up in all kinds of places.  This is one of the most unusual places I've seen for a bike park, dozens of feet under ground in an old, abandined mine.  What is now the Lousiville Mega Cavern was an operating limestone mine from the 1930's into the 1970's.  Limestone is the same kind of rock the pyramids in Egypt were built out of.  No pyramids here, though.  

The mine sat unused for years, apparently, until it was bought by some business developers in 1989.  High security offices and storage space  was the initial idea.  But the place is huge, over 100 acres total.  So in the 2010's zip lines, obstacle courses, and Christmas light displays were added to the mix, to better use the remaining space, and make some more money.  And a bike park was built.  Being a cave, if man made, it stays a constant 58 degrees all year 'round, and it's out of the rain.  The total bike park was about 320,000 square feet, I believe.  That's ginormous.  To put that in perspective, a typical Walmart or Target store is usually around 100,000 square feet.  So imagine a BMX and mountain bike park that's the size of a big store, including the parking lot, warehouse area, and everything.  That's a lot of bike trails and jumps.  The bike park has closed down, in 2019, it appears.

In 2019, after a 3.4 earthquake in Tennessee, a good sized sinkhole formed in part of the Lousiville Zoo, above the Mega Cavern.  So if you can't find the unicorns at the Louisville Zoo, that's why, they fell through the sinkhole and hid out in the Mega Cavern.  OK, just kidding.  The unicorns probably got shot and eaten by hillbillies.  But part of the Mega Cavern closed, and one site says that was when the bike park closed.  You can read a bit about the history of the Mega Cavern here.  The Lousiville Mega Cavern is billed as the #1 attraction in Louisville, even without the bike park.  Here's the main website if you want to check out what's happening there now.