Kartchner....like the caverns?

Living in Canada saying the name "Kartchner" usually gets a confused look. Most people have never heard the name before and have no clue how to spell it. Here we get questions like, "are you any relation to...," or "Kartchner, like the caverns?" We have know about these caverns for many many years but never taken the time to go visit. Since it is fall break and a day of driving and cave wandering sounded like fun, to some of us, we decided to head to southern Arizona and see what they were like first hand.

The caves were first discovered in 1974 by two "cavers" but not made public until 1988. These two gentlemen, Tufts and Tenen spent many weekends together looking for caves. The passage they discovered to get into the caves was a sink hole. After testing for rattlesnakes they slithered their way into the small awkward opening. The passageway opened into one room then another but they were dry and dusty, typical to AZ caves. They then found another crawl space that had moist air squirting through it. It took them a couple of hours to chisel their opening large enough that they could scrape through. What they found was beyond imagination. Kartchner Caverns is the largest living cave in Arizona, home to stalactities and stalacmites, calcite curtains and many more geological discoveries I don't remember the names of.

The owner of the land the caves sit on was J. A. Kartchner, when Tufts and Tenen finally informed him of the cave sitting on his land he was as determined as they were to keep it secret until they were sure it could be protected. The land was sold to the state and named a state park in 1988...it opened to the public in 1992. It took several years to study the cave and make it safe for visitors. It truly was amazing. Unfortunately we went when one of the rooms was closed to the public. It is closed half the year for the bats.

These are the hills housing the amazing caves, you can see the car / train that takes you to the entrance.Cameras are not permitted into the caves but here are some photos from a magazine we've had since 1988. It shows some of the the stalactities and a calcite curtain. There were amazing creations called straws, one we saw was over 15 feet long. They are hollow in the middle, thus the name straw.


The pictures do not do justice to the creations.

As a side note just after we drove out of the park headed back we saw the biggest ugliest coral colored snake in the road, it was coiled with his head sticking up. Luckily Monte swerved and did not run over (would of been on my side) but hopefully someone else did kill the disgusting creature. Makes we want to throw up!!!!