Kartchner Caverns: Fourteen Years of Silence

In November of nineteen seventy-four, two young cavers named Gary Tenen and Randy Tufts were scrambling through limestone hills at the base of the Whetstone Mountains, nine miles south of Benson, when they found a narrow crack in the floor of a sinkhole. Warm, moist air was breathing out of it. They squeezed through and discovered something extraordinary: more than two and a half miles of pristine cave passages filled with living formations still growing after fifty thousand years.

For the next three years they told no one. They returned again and again, mapping passages and debating how to protect what they had found. In February of nineteen seventy-eight they finally confided in the landowners, James and Lois Kartchner, who agreed to keep the secret.

It was not until nineteen eighty-eight, fourteen years after the discovery, that the cave was formally transferred to Arizona State Parks. The state spent more than twenty-eight million dollars on systems to preserve the cave's perfect humidity and temperature before opening the upper caverns in November of nineteen ninety-nine. The Big Room followed in two thousand three.

What makes Kartchner remarkable even among living caves is scale. The Kubla Khan column rises fifty-eight feet from floor to ceiling, the tallest cave column in Arizona. A soda straw stalactite in the Throne Room stretches twenty-one feet three inches, among the longest anywhere in the world.

Every summer up to two thousand female cave myotis bats use the Big Room as a maternity roost, each giving birth to a single pup and consuming roughly half a ton of insects before leaving in the fall. About sixty percent of the cave remains permanently closed to protect the formations.