A 13-year-old crawled into a Tennessee cave and found a hidden lake

In 1905, a 13-year-old boy exploring Tennessee's Craighead Caverns squeezed through a narrow, muddy passage and stumbled upon something far larger than he could have imagined: a vast chamber containing an underground lake. His name was Ben Sands, and his discovery would eventually become known as the Lost Sea, today recognised as the largest underground lake in the United States. More than a century later, the cavern remains one of Tennessee's most unusual natural attractions, with visitors travelling deep underground to see its enormous body of water. The Lost Sea is an American wonder about 140 feet below the surface. The cave itself has an even older history, with evidence of Indigenous use, Civil War-era mining and other human activity. What began with a curious teenager squeezing through an opening has since become a place where geology, history and exploration converge beneath the Tennessee landscape. Meet Ben Sands, the Tennessee teenager who squeezed through a passage no wider than a bicycle tyreThe story begins deep inside Craighead Caverns, near Sweetwater in eastern Tennessee. According to CBS News' report, Ben Sands was only 13 when he crawled through a tunnel described...