DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'm just the voice along for the ride. Somewhere beneath the ground in Williamson County, Texas, there is a secret that kept itself for a very long time. A hundred million years, give or take.
The place is called Inner Space Cavern — Laubach Cave, if you want to use its proper name — and the story of how it came to light is one of those only-in-Texas moments you just couldn't make up. It was 1963, and a core-drilling team with the Texas Highway Department was out on the land of W. W.
Laubach, doing what highway crews do — boring into the earth, looking for what's underneath before they build on top of it. What they found was not bedrock data. What they found was a cave.
Carved by water out of Edwards limestone, sitting right along the Balcones Fault, and by the best estimates of the people who study such things, about one hundred million years old. The highway crew didn't build over it. Exploration began in November of 1963, and according to the marker, it continues to the present.
Now here's a thing worth sitting with for a second. Ninety-five percent of the formations inside that cave are still growing. Still.
Right now. Water still doing its slow, patient work in the dark. But the cave hasn't always been sealed away from the surface.
It was apparently open during the late Pleistocene — that's somewhere between twenty thousand and forty-five thousand years ago — and during that time, things fell in. Or wandered in. Or didn't wander back out.
In the debris cones that filled up those old natural entrances, researchers have found the bones of many extinct mammals. Sabre-toothed cats. Mammoths.
Creatures that walked a very different Texas. The cave held onto them all these ages, right there under a highway right-of-way, waiting on a drill bit. Sometimes the most extraordinary thing in the county is the one nobody's looked down far enough to find.
What the marker says
Discovered in 1963 on land of W. W. Laubach by core-drilling team, Texas Highway Department. Exploration begain in November 1963 and continues to present. Carved by water from Edwards limestone, cave lies along the Balcones Fault and is estimated to be 100 million years old. 95 percent of formations are still growing. Cave was apparently open during late Pleistocene (20,000 - 45,000 years ago), for bones of many extinct mammals have been found in debris cones filling former natural entrances. Remains of sabre-toothed cats and mammoths are represented. (1973)