Spelunking

Thursday, March 10, 2010

BENSON, AZ – Today we went underground, into the marvelous caverns south of Benson at Kartchner Caverns State Park. It was a fairly short drive from the campground, west on Interstate 10 and then south on Interstate 90, but it was still lovely with the desert landscape and purple hills on the horizon.

The story of the caverns would make a great movie. Two university students go spelunking in the Whetstone Mountains of Arizona and find a sinkhole with an entrance into the cavern. They are so excited and fascinated by what they have found that they keep it a secret for 14 years. In their student days, they bring a third person with them to stand guard in case something happens to them underground, but that person is blindfolded from the time they leave Tucson till they get to the sinkhole. They hide their truck in the brush and crouch behind the bushes if a car goes by, only coming out to the road when the coast is clear.

They know they have found a unique and valuable treasure, so they try to find out whose land they’ve been visiting, and learn it belongs to Mr. James Kartchner, a teacher. They screw up their courage and pay him a visit, and show him slides of what they’ve found under the two ordinary-looking hills on his land. Mr. Kartchner agrees that it’s quite a find, but is not interested in selling his land. Finally, someone puts Mr. Kartchner in touch with the Arizona state government, and after considerable discussion, the land is sold to the government for development.

The two discoverers, Gary Tenen and Randy Tufts, work closely with developers to make the caverns accessible to visitors while protecting its fragility. It takes years for them to create entrances, build pathways inside, erect lighting and prepare the above-ground facilities where the site will be interpreted, all with the greatest care.

In 1999 the ribbon was cut and the caverns became accessible to the public. For our visit today, we were required to leave behind purses, cameras, food (even gum) and any items that could be dropped. On entering, we were misted with water to contain any lint or flakes of skin, and were instructed not to touch anything inside. Great sealed doors with rubber weatherstripping scraped open to let us in to a series of airlocks that keep the moisture in and the dry Arizona atmosphere out. We could feel the humid air seep into our clothing as we stepped in!

The wetness is one of the unique aspects of these caverns, with water that seeps in between cracks of rock, causing stalactites and stalagmites to continue growing. We saw amazing formations inside, some that looked like rippled curtains, others like lumpy columns, and some called “soda straws” because that’s what they looked like! The lighting was controlled by our guide so that only the section we were passing through could be seen; this protected the formations from heat that lights give off, which could unbalance the ecosystem. In one section, needle-like stalactites jutting down from the ceiling were back-lit so you could see sparkling pearls of water at the tip of each one; it was beautiful!
We were fortunate enough to visit, on separate tours, both the Big Room cave and the Throne Room cave; after April the first one is closed to the public because that’s when the bats move back in for the summer. Their guano nourishes some 40 different invertebrates that most of us have never heard of. A lot of scientists are finding out new things from these caverns that they’ve never heard of either.

Between our morning and afternoon tours, we bought lunch at the Bat Cave Café and walked around the beautifully-landscaped grounds, where all kinds of desert plants are growing – and are labeled for people like us who have no idea what they are! There was a walking trail that we followed only for a short distance, as we weren’t quite up to doing the entire 2.5 miles in the noon-day heat.

Since we couldn’t take any pictures inside the caverns, we suggest looking at the website for Arizona State Parks at www.azstateparks.com to get an idea of what we saw.