Crystal Cave offers under-this-world experience

Rachel Kroeger

Staff

August 18, 2025

SPRING VALLEY – Executive Director Eric McMaster said Crystal Cave was discovered by two local farm boys in 1881.

“William and George Vanasse were playing in a field here in Spring Valley, and they saw a woodchuck go into a small hole in the ground,” he said. “They came back the next day with a kerosene lantern, opened it up and lowered themselves down into the hole – thus, discovering Crystal Cave.”

Prior to 1941 – when McMaster said Henry and Mary Friede purchased the property with the intention of “developing a show cave” – he said Crystal Cave remained “a local curiosity.”

“They bought it in 1941 and then opened it up in 1942,” he said.

Nearly a century and a half later, McMaster said Crystal Cave is now a go-to day-trip destination for both West Central Wisconsinites and Minnesotans from across the Mississippi.

Look, don’t touch

Offering tours of the cave – the longest in the state, McMaster said – is the “core” of Crystal Cave’s business.

“In 1992, some cavers were able to explore and connect another cave on the property with Crystal Cave,” he said. “So, we’re just now under a mile in length – the longest cave in Wisconsin.”

However, McMaster said not every part of Crystal Cave is accessible to tour-goers.

“A lot of those passages in that [additional] section [involve] crawling, squeezing [and] mud – things you’re not going to do on the tour,” he said.

McMaster said the Crystal Cave tour offers customers lit, gravel paths to comfortably take in its astounding underground sights.

Estimated to be “about one million years old,” McMaster said Crystal Cave was created in a similar way to the other hundreds of caves across the Badger State.

“We’ve got this limestone bedrock here, and that’s the kind of stone most caves are formed in because of how they are formed with groundwater,” he said. “Then, in addition to that, we had the glaciers that came through.”

The last glaciers to push their way into Wisconsin’s west central region, McMaster said, came through “about 12,000-20,000 years ago” – shoving glacial debris and mud into “a lot of the caves in the area.”

“So, what happened to Crystal Cave?” he said. “When it was discovered, it was a smaller cave, and then when the Friedes commercialized [it]… they dug out the glacial fill.”

Because the Friedes only dug to its original walls, McMaster said Crystal Cave maintained its identity as a cave – “versus a mine, which is man-made.”

Geological timeframes, McMaster said, are “incredibly slow,” as the fixtures in a cave – and the cave itself – are formed over thousands of years.

“We’re thinking [in terms of] decades or centuries here,” he said. “For example, our formations in our caves grow about one inch every 100 years.”

That’s why McMaster said Crystal Cave tours require some basic rules to prevent damage to the millions of years of hard work.

“The oil on our skin can damage [the formation] process and can affect how cave formations grow,” he said. “So, one of the big [rules] we have is we ask the guests not to touch any of our formations… You could even break them if you’re aggressive.”

‘What else do you have?’

McMaster said he discovered caving while earning undergraduate and graduate degrees at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.

“Both myself and my spouse got really involved in caving down there,” he said. “When we moved back to Minnesota, I ended up [working] in a different industry – running a company called Kwik Sew Pattern [that made] patterns for home sewing.”

A competitor, McMaster said, bought the company out more than a decade ago – leading him to purchase the Crystal Cave property in 2012.

“I knew the old owners of Crystal Cave – Blaze and Jean Cunningham – because we’re in a small, caving community, and I’ve been caving here in the Midwest [since I moved back],” he said. “[They] wanted to retire, I was looking for the next chapter in my life, and I thought it would be interesting and fun to run Crystal Cave.”

Though an industry he’s familiar with as a hobbyist, McMaster said he’d never professionally operated a commercialized cave prior to 2012.

“It’s a completely different industry, as a tourism industry, but a lot of the aspects of running a business [and] that skill set [transfers over],” he said.

Drawing on his experience heading his former company, McMaster said he’s both maintained and expanded upon what the previous owners of Crystal Cave built.

“We draw a lot of our [customers] from either Eau Claire or Minneapolis and St. Paul, because people will drive a long distance to visit us,” he said. “The big thing we saw was people would come out here, they do the cave tour and [say], ‘I’ve invested in driving out here [and] I’ve done the tour – what else do you have?’”

That’s when McMaster said they decided to build a mini golf course on the Crystal Cave property.

“We’ve got Tee-Rex Mini Golf – an educational, 18-hole mini golf course,” he said. “You’re having fun, you’re putting around a T-rex head or through a dino bone, but you’re also [reading] these educational signs on each hole.”

Also at Crystal Cave, McMaster said, is Prospector’s Creek, where customers can “pan for real gems, real minerals and real fossils from all over the world.”

“We [also] took an old farm field and – along with the Wisconsin DNR and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service – we converted that into a prairie [with] a nice hiking trail through it,” he said. “We’re trying to make it so if people are driving out here from the Twin Cities, they’ve got enough to do here to make it a full-day activity.”

Eager staff

In the Spring Valley area of West Central Wisconsin and beyond, McMaster said he doesn’t compete with other cave owners, but rather collaborates with them.

“If people have a good experience at Crystal Cave, then they’re more likely to go down to Niagara Cave or Mystery Cave in Minnesota, or maybe Cave of the Mounds down in Madison and visit those caves,” he said.

Collaboration and drawing on one another’s customer base, McMaster said, is common practice among cave owners.

“We’re all part of a national organization called the NCA (National Caves Association),” he said. “We all get together [as] friends [to] share what works and what doesn’t work with other cave owners.”

One problem McMaster said he’s experienced since becoming a cave owner is finding reliable seasonal staffing.

“A lot of my staff is seasonal,” he said. “So, being able to get seasonal staff is always a bit of a challenge because being out in rural Wisconsin, we’re just far enough [of] a drive [away].”

To help alleviate that issue, McMaster said Crystal Cave acquired two nearby houses in Spring Valley to renovate and rent out to his seasonal staff.

“We hire anyone from high school students to people who are in college or doing college internships to people [who] just graduated,” he said. “We [also hire] some of the teachers who are looking for employment in the summer or retirees who are looking for something to do.”

McMaster said a common theme among his staff, however, is “everybody enjoys talking.”

“We have a great staff here,” he said. “A lot of them have backgrounds or interests in either teaching, education or environmental science…, but they all enjoy working with the public and sharing Crystal Cave with the public.”

Above all, McMaster said he and his staff enjoy the diversity of workplace options afforded to them at Crystal Cave.

“It’s kind of fun when your office is either a cave, a garden or a prairie,” he said.

For more information regarding its on-site activities or to reserve a spot on Crystal Cave’s tours, visit its aforementioned website or social media pages.