Kartchner Caverns, Part 1

be talking about car caverns in Arizona. We'll be talking about this particular cave and what makes it special, but we'll also be covering some related content that extends well beyond this particular cave system and even beyond our planet perhaps. So yeah, if you're outside of Arizona or you've never been to Cartooner Caverns does not matter. These topics are going to be to a certain extent universal.

from Phoenix, you two can visit this amazing place. I'll just warn you up on to get your tickets for the cave tours ahead of time, because this is one of those things that definitely fills up and you cannot necessarily depend on getting day off tickets when you show up. They also have some hiking trails. There's cabin camping RV

slots available, so you know you can make it. You can plan your entire trip around visiting Cartoner Caverns, or you can create it as a nice little add onto whatever you happen to be doing in the Tucson area. And there's plenty of stuff to do down there. So Cartoner Caverns. And to be clear, Joe, you have not been to Cartoner Caverns.

of reasons. I mean, obviously I have a personal attachment to it since I visited it, but also a considerable amount of effort was made to balance cave conservation with tourism. Here for a cave that had seemingly not been discovered by humans until the nineteen seventies.

us in spiritual, creative, and artistic ways. Various caves speak to this, of course, containing and preserving ancient human remains and ancient human works of art, and of course caves call to various other life forms as well, and their interest in these caves can also transform them. We've talked about examples of that as well. But as we all know, human interest can be especially destructive prehistoric caved or of course of immense cultural and historic value to us. But

at the end of the day, it is graffiti. It is very ancient graffiti, and humans have sadly never really stopped scrawling and painting on the walls of caves, well past the point where it becomes culturally insightful, at least for contemporary humans. I guess you could make an argument that something that somebody scrawled on a cave in nineteen eighty see, would be of interest to someone looking back on it from three thousand and eighty se But yeah, you know, it's hard to make a case for that.

So more on that in a bit. You know, we we can mess up these places in any number of ways. You know, we bring our refuse into these places. We also in many cases, this is a case for so many different things. But even when we like an environment, we've had destructive things that we've done to them. We've said, well, this is great, we love this place. Let's take all this back with us. And so we've done that with caves'

we've harvested what we want from their depths. Sometimes it has more of a you know, utility use, like taking away the batguano and using it for fertilizer. But then we've also done this with novel rock formations as well. I look at these stalactites and stalagmites. Let's break off a few of these and bring them back home. We're going to do something with them, and of course they take a very long time to form. Yeah. Yeah.

it's here to stay. These these have been here for thousands of years, but in many cases they are quite fragile. They can be easily damaged, even when we're not trying to actually break something off and bring it with us.

And then also in opening up a cave, creating what is sometimes called a show cave, creating a tourist attraction out of the cave, which of course is a benefit to so many of us, Like I would not I would I certainly wouldn't have wound up in carton or caverns had it not been opened up in very significant ways for human beings to access it. But if you open them up in the wrong ways, you can also

drastically change an environment. For instance, if it is a wet cave a humid cave, you created huge opening there and you may lose all that vital humidity.

Rangers say, So, that's a funny statement, but the rangers are making the case that it's literally true. So in a news release from September sixth of twenty twenty four, rangers from Carlsbad Caverns announced that a visitor to the cave had left behind a piece of litter. It was a Cheeto's bag. This was at a sight within the cave called the Big Room. And this might not The whole point of this was it might not seem like

a big deal to the person who leaves it. It's just one piece of trash, but the rangers emphasized that this has dire implications for the ecosystem of the cave. Here I'm going to quote from the article, and this includes some secondary quotes from the rangers release.

nearby surfaces, fruit die and stink. And then it says the rangers had to go through this cleaning process to not just pick up the litter, but there's actually sort of a decontamination you have to do to remove foreign molds from the area. And it says, quote, at the scale of a human perspective, a spilled snack bag may seem trivial, but to the life of the cave, it can be world changing.

that rock? There is a part of you that you may know not to scrawl on it, but you at least want to touch it, right, And even that most of these caves where they're really taking taking conservation seriously, like that has to be cleaned after you've you've touched it, because otherwise it develops into this kind of like gross black spot because you have you have disrupted it.

balancing competing interests. Like you know, on one hand, you want to protect the cave as much as possible, but you might also have educational desires or you know, stuff about raising funds to help study and preserve the cave in other ways. And so yeah, there's like a competing mix of considerations there that I guess are always difficult for people who work in this area.

lin flakes of human skin. These are big ones that we'll come back to because we've talked about this before on the show. But we modern humans walk around kind of like wafting our own little at times invisible clouds of skin flakes and lint, and when we venture into a cave, we bring that cloud with us and guess what we leave that stuff behind. So you could say, well, to a large extent, well, the answer seems simple, right, let's just not go into these places. Let's just seal

it off. And sometimes that is what happens, to varying degrees for different reasons. Some cave systems are either wholly or partially closed off at least to the public for a variety of concerns, and these include hazardous aspects of the cave itself, fragile ecosystems, and delicate human artifacts as well. But it just isn't always feasible, right because for starters, again, humans desire these caves. We want to study them, we want to just look at them. Some of us want

the adventure and even the thrill of accessing them. We want these things, and being stubborn humans were not going to be denied them. And instead of trying to prevent human access from happening, sometimes the path to preservation and protection is finding a way to balance it all with human interest and actually using that human interest in the cave's favor. And again, I think Cartooner Caverns is an interesting case study of how all these things come together.

All Right, I'm going to get into a little bit about the history of Cartoner Caverns here, and this is going to be a mix of things. Some of it is information that I learned in the guided Cartner Caverns tours also in their museum. They also depended on this excellent book, Carterner Caverns, How Two Cavers Discovered and Saved one of the Wonders of the natural World, by Neil Miller. This is it right here for you folks with visuals. This was published by the University of Arizona Press in

two thousand and eight. It's it's a great book. Perhaps the definitive book on the history of this cave. There's also an older concise history on the website for Cartoner Caverns, and this was by written by one Charles R. Etherly. That one's also pretty good and goes through some of the broad strokes of the various challenges and the process that had the various processes that had to be gone through in order to reach the point where this cave was open to the public.

This is area. This area here is a semi desert grassland kind of in a to understand in a transitional zone between between the Chihuahuan Desert, which extends west and south and the Sonoran Desert, which dips more or less straight down and kind of goes to either side of the Gulf of California. This particular area has a long history of human occupation, going back at least ten thousand years,

and you'll find examples of this ancient habitation in the area. So, for instance, if you do some of the trails in Cartner Kavern State Park, you'll find these bedrock mortars, and you know, they're pointed out by the signage, and these ancient places where ancient peoples made these little indentions in the rock and use them to grind down, you know,

grains and whatnot. And those, you know, I found those to be particularly almost kind of like holy places to you know, to kneel beside and feel the smoothness of the rock and sort of you know, get the sense of that human history there.

early as nine hundred CE. Again, people, ancient peoples like modern people's, were just enamored by these places. Now, I mentioned the hiking trails already at Kartchner Caverns, and these are quite nice. You know, you're going to go on a nice nature walk looping around the area where the cave is found. And in fact, you can literally go around the cave, because this isn't something that exists, say, beneath the welcome center at Kirchner Caverns. It is instead

inside the hills behind the welcome center. So it's an interesting experience to walk a round these hills that's kind of stand like secret cathedrals, and we know what's inside of them. That ancient people's walking in these same hills, perhaps with differing flora, would have would not have known. You know, only the bats knew of it, and they kept this secret to themselves for perhaps something like forty thousand years or even longer. Wow, bats notoriously tight lift. Yeah.

So fast forward to the mid nineteen sixties and seventies. I've heard this described as a golden age of Arizona Cave explorations. So you had eager spilunkers venturing out into the vast Arizona wilderness in search of new cave systems. There just was apparently a whole lot that had not been discovered yet, and so the dream was alive for particularly young daring cavers to go out and find something that it had just never been seen before.

openings or like crawl into tight places. Man, that is like a in fact, I almost listeners I want to hear from you, like crawling into unexplored caves, crawling into tight spaces and little narrow openings. Do you feel that impulse? What does that feel like? I would like to hear that describe, because that is a type of exploration curiosity that is more alien to me than all the others.

of yourself through it. And and so like one of the like the training scenarios that one of our our signature cavers here would do is we take a wire coat hanger at home, expand it, and then practice crawling through that that coat hanger. Like, that's the sort of space that you're training for, and it's not going to be smooth plastic, it's going to be rock. Yeah. So yeah,

not for me, not for you. But there you know, there are adventurous souls out there who are like, yeah, let me get in there, let me see what's on the other side of that. Yikes. So this is the this is the caving world that our signature cavers are a part of. These are two young daring cavers that were members of a Tucson Caving Club, and they were interested in exploring the Wetstones. This is Randy Tufts and Tenan.

As Miller explains in the book, this was an area long considered harsh and uninviting except empty except for deer and havelina. Most of its history in recent centuries was associated with conflict between the Apaches and the US military or outlaw violence, and the lands had also seen little in the way of mining, and so there were fewer access roads. It just wasn't an area that most people

were particularly interested in. But for Tuffts and Teenan, they knew that the Whetstones had everything required for substantial caves to exist. There was limestone, there were natural faults, and

there was water. So starting here with Randy Tuffs in nineteen sixty seven, he'd gone cave hunting with a couple of relatives and they discovered a sinkhole in this area and they descended down into it, and then they quickly realized, well, they were far from the only people to have accessed this particular little cave because there were the human signs, there was graffiti, there was litter, and it wasn't ancient cave paintings. It was like somebody had spray painted a

skull and crossbones or something. There were beer bottles, that sort of thing. I don't know why people I've seen beer bottles and caves like this before, Like, what is it about a cave that someone's like, oh, man, I got to get in there and drink a beer.

much about it. But then fast forward to nineteen seventy four, Tuffs discovered what seemed like another possible opening to a cave system nearby and set out to explore it with fellow cave or dary Tinan. But when they checked it out, it didn't lead anywhere. It was a dead end, so they were disappointed, but he remembered the sinkhole from years prior, and not wanting to return home without getting underground a little bit, Tufts took Tinan back to its graffiti chamber

and they were looking around. But something was different this time. They felt an airflow coming through that crack that they noted before, that he'd noticed on a previous adventure there, And so they worked their way through that crack, and then five feet down they found another pair of rooms and these had not been visibly reached by humans before, so they were, you know, somewhat excited by this. And again,

already we're dealing with very tight, tight spots. Miller points out that Tufts had been, you know, he'd been practicing the whole coat hanger thing for a while to be ready for this. And Tufts was a little guy, so he didn't have much trouble with squeezing thus far in this cave system. But Tinan was a bit taller, I think, a little bit a little bit thicker, so he had to struggle a bit more, had to like, you know, exhale completely in order to do some of these squeezes,

but they were making do. They continued on from here, crawling through and what is supposedly an excruciating twenty foot slender tunnel, till they came to what they would call the blowhole, a great fruit sized hole that clearly led to some greater area and allowed airflow. So that's key, Like there's air flowing in and out, there's air transference, and this is a telltale sign that you know there's a larger system in play.

to backtrack for a variety of reasons. So, yeah, these these can be very dangerous environments. You absolutely need to know what you're doing and follow the necessary safety precautions.

squeeze through. He was able to get his head through, get his shoulder through, work on the rest, and now at this point they can continue you chiseling on it, but from both sides, and so after a long time they're able to get tenin to squeeze through as well. So now they've both done it. They've both crossed through into the next area. And at this point they're actually getting into areas where they can sort of stand up. It's still cramped, but it's opening up. It's very promising.

They press on a bit further and they realize what they found a wet, humid, living cave system featuring multiple large rooms, extensive tunnels, and a vast array of breath taking cave formations, and all of it seemingly discovered only by bats. Like there's plenty of guano around, So bats were accessing this space. Bats were living here, but it seemed that humans had never been here before. This was the dream.

a lot warmer due to high humidity. Miller wrote, quote, the damp air smelled like the basement of a house that had been shut up since the beginning of time.

get into. You know, it's like all of our garments are lynch shedding garments, and so they're like, please don't bring a whole bunch of layers that you're going to potentially strip off in the cave or have dangling off of your body and touching things so forth. So yeah, so they they'd found it. This was the dream, and they were tempted to keep going. But these were a pair of cavers who you know, prided themselves on safety, and they had already violated a key caving safety rule

by not having a third person on the team. And also no one else in the world knew they were here.

precautions that that experienced cavers are utilizing. Yeah, so Tustan Tin and they were like we got to get out of here. This is already you know this, you know, for a number of reasons. We got to we gotta leave. So they get out, they climb back out into the chilly November environment, they head home, but they definitely come back. And so the story from here on out, highlighted in that Ely article and discussed at length in the Miller book,

is one of the struggles to preserve the cave. But here here are a couple of underlying facts to the discovery thus far that are important. So, first of all, Tufsenteenen had no official permission to explore this newly found cave on what they presume to be state lands.

These people find out that they have a valuable cave system on their property, well maybe they want to sell it to the highest bidder. Maybe they don't want anybody to have access to it. You know, there's so many different ways that could go. So that's one thing. And then they also had no way of protecting their discovery at this point, no matter who ends up owning the property, like, they just have to depend on pure secrecy and stealth.

And so they tried very hard to keep secrecy in place over the next four and ultimately fourteen years, refer using a lot of code names and you know, making sure that anybody that was in on the secret was brought in, you know, just to the degree that was needed. And they ended up calling this cave system at the time Xanadu. In reference to the Coleridge poem Kubla Khan from seventeen ninety seven.

was acceptable in the seventies. They didn't have podcasts yet they bring in limited gear, just enough food to sustain themselves on what was ultimately like a short jaunt in the cave and then back out driving back to Tucson. One of the things that they mentioned that Miller mentions of the book, you know, through these interviews with folks involved, is that cavers, in general, they don't want to You don't want to bring in a lot of food because

anything you bring in you got to bring out. If you go to the bathroom in the cave, you got to do something about that as well. And in general, like if you're squeezing through all these little spots, you don't really want a full belly.

cave from human and most animal access for millennia. You know, like the bats were getting in here, there's some other organisms, but like it's not like there are skunks crawling in

here and so forth. Like one of the really interesting things that I discovered on the tour was that, yeah, we have these bats coming in seasonally to roost, and sometimes what happens abat dies, right, Yeah, a bat dye any kind of like small mammal dies in other environments, there's a there's a whole system that decomposes that organism and consumes it. But like they pointed out one bat, it's like, yep, this one's left over from the last

root and it's just there. And then there's actually a stalagmite in Cartoner caverns where it's hard to see now, but there's a bat in it where and it was there when these guys discovered it, and It's a little harder to see now because again it's a looting cave. Water continues to drip, the rock continues to build up, but it's just it's this. The dead body of the

bat is entombed there. That's amazing. Yeah. So yeah, there are other cave systems where bats roost, and there are various organisms that you may have seen in nature documentaries where the skunks will come in or some other organisms from the outside will come in to take advantage of meals to be had there, at least in a seasonal fashion. But that is not the case with this cave.

there was now an awakened rattlesnake there. Oh boy, but I don't think anyone ever was bitten by it.

the rope because there's just too much mud. It's too slick, and they just kind of have to spend an extended amount of time trying new things, and eventually a big part of what helps them is the mud on their gloves and on the rope dries out enough to where they have a little more purchase to get back up.

So somebody posted online a video walk through, and one of the things that was pointed out in it was in one of the larger rooms of the cave, there's kind of a big mud floor and there's like a trail leading through it, and the tour guide points out that that was the original trail that the first explorers were using to go in and out, and so you can just still see this sort of line cut through the mud, like they were trying to use the same the same path each time.

Like some of the locals thought they were working on I think some irrigation ditches or something, and they did not correct them. Eventually, they would use blindfolds, contracts, and other means to keep people they were on it in the dark. They'd physically cover up the blowhole and position rocks in such a way as to clue them in if investigation by unknown parties had occurred, and they ultimately were able to keep it secret like this for again

fourteen years. So I'm not going to go through all the fascinating nuts and bolts of the story here, especially as it gets into Arizona state politics and the like. But here's some broad strokes and the rest of the story. So they'd achieved every caver's dream. An undiscovered cave never

suffered historic vandalism like Onyx Cave in Arizona. It was also a living cave, a wet cave, unlike the dry colossal cave, and it gave everyone the possibility to really try and do right by this cave, to protect it from the get go and look after it with a contemporary understanding of things. But how do you go about that? How do you protect such a natural treasure? Well, tuffsent teenen. They've laid out four possible ways to go about it.

One was gating, another was ceiling, another was the establishment of a research center, and then the fourth was commercialization. So gating, they argued, this would just draw more attention to the cave.

tell a caver that they can't access a cave. They're they're they're not necessarily going to take that at face value and then sealing it, like going the extra step of like making it, you know, putting some sort of like say, concrete sarcophagus over the entrance. This would they say, create a false sense of security, because it it might you know, it might protect the cave from access by humans, but it wouldn't. And then there is the head a thing, Well,

what do you do about the bats? Right? The bats still need to get in. Without even getting into that, you still have the dangers of drilling, prospecting, and mining that are still going to be in play. And also

you're locking the cave away from educational, scientific, and esthetic appreciation. Again, you know, we can, we can, you know, can we can talk about conserving the caves out there, but you know, we still we want to access them, and there are some good reasons for humans to be able to access them if it can be done in an equitable fashion. And they as far as the idea of turning it into a research center. They said that, Okay, this is

a great cave. It's an amazing cave, but it's probably not biologically diverse or large enough to host a research center. And the thing about research research projects is that they end eventually, so you're not necessarily dealing with truly long term protection for the site. And so that brings us back to commercialization. And this ends up being the best option and the one they end up pitching because again they have to pitch this to somebody because it's not

on state land. They find out after they've i think reached out to some state parks people. No, this land is owned by the Carchner family. And they had to then go make the case to the cartooners and try to bring them on, giving them a crash course in caves and you know, preparing them, you know for what all of this means, telling them what they had, and then in trying to instill in them the need to protect it and telling them how they might achieve that.

And so again, there's so many ways this could have gone wrong if the cartooners had been different people. But they're great examples or not maybe not great. There are there are telling examples from previous decades of caves that have been opened up turned into show caves in more disastrous ways, caves that have been opened up with more of an engineer's mindset, like how do we physically do it, how do we get people down there? What sort of

elevators do we install? Or a pure showman's enthusiasm, like how do we turn this into pure entertainment for the people. Anyway, they luck out because the cartooner has proved to be sensible and straightforward about all of this. James Krchner, the patriarch of the family, had a background in education, which was obviously helpful and so toughsent teen and made this

proposition to them. They gave them these four options. They end up landing on the turning it into more of a commercial venture, with the idea that, yeah, if you open it up like this, research can still happen, people can come and appreciate it. But it also is I guess you could say paying for itself if it is positioned just ride.

two parties. First of all, tufsent teen and needed to remain a part of the process to ensure that no short curt cuts end up being made later on as this is you know, process as it transitions from a private to a state matter. And then James Karchner, for his part, one of the things that he insisted on is like, well, I want to see it. Take me down there. Let me see this thing. He was seventy eight years old, and he crawled through the hole. He

crawled through the hole. There's a picture in the book, in Miller's book of him crawling through the blowhole. So this this old guy was, Yeah, this was a tough, old old geezer. He crawled through. Got to see it

with his own eyes. Wow. So there's a fair amount of drama that follows from that point with everything that can earning everything from changes in the Arizona Arizona political climate to construction challenges because you know, part of opening it up is people can't come through the blow like that's not how you access it today. You've got to create some significant mind tunnels so that people can stroll

in and reach it. So they had to do all that their engineering challenges there and also trying to build that in a way that wasn't like too destructive for the surrounding area, that sort of thing, you know, trying to use explosives as little as possible, those sorts of concerns. There was even an attempt by rival cavers at one point to tunnel into Xanad through what they thought was another collapsed entrance, and so some of the Xanad crew

had to like infiltrate and sabotage that effort. So, yeah, all sorts of cave druma. So ultimately, over the course of this fourteen year period like that, the project faces unforeseen challenges in research, planning, construction, legislative threats, mining concerns, and legal issues. But then the cave officially opens to the public in nineteen ninety nine. The area that is now called the rotunda in the Throne Room, and then the Big Room opened in two thousand and three, So

we'll come back to this. But the rotunda in the Throne Room or the this is where I visited on my initial tour, and then the Big room. This is where the bats go. This is where where previous I most recently visited.

But my understanding is this tunneled and the new entrance they had to make to the cave, the tunneled entrance, They've gone to pretty great lengths to make that sort of an air lock like there are there's kind of a decontamination or airlock procedure you have to go through that's going to try to preserve the cave and preserve the cave as much as possible, limit incoming contamination and limit uh, the the loss of moisture and internal atmosphere to the outside.

you don't potentially spread white nose syndrome to the bats. There. You you enter through a series of sealed steel doors essentially air locks and long tunnels. And then and then after this there's this, there's a misting corridor. And this is what it sounds like. You're essentially like hose down. I mean, not to the point where you're dripping, but there's like a mist It's kind of like being in the vegetable section of a grocery store. And this serves

a number of purposes. So first of all, it helps account for the moisture lost when humans venture in and then back out again.

constantly shedding. The idea here is like you kind of wet all that down, make it heavier, and then as that stuff leaves our bodies during the tour, it's not floating off and then sticking to the surfaces of the cave. It's following more or less straight down onto the concrete a pathway that you're walking on, and you are on a concrete pathway the entire time, and their guard rails and so forth. So ideally you never touch anything except for the handrails. You don't ever walk on anything except

for this concrete surface. And they're able to clean all of that down without having to clean the actual cave surfaces. And if you do come into contact with any of these other cave surfaces, well then they have to do spot cleans, Okay, but uh yeah, again, just it's it's just it's a very it's an amazing experience just to venture into it before you even get to see any

of these amazing cave formations. One other thing I want to mention is that when you're going through the caves, the lights only come on when they're humans around, So they're like, so they're not lights on down there all the time. It's only when humans are down there, and as they move through the cave, which is ide because this is a dark environment. Yeah. And then as far as the bats go again, the big room, which is like a five acre chamber, a half mile of walkways.

This is the area where the bats are seasonally. And when the bats are here, the lights are not here, people are not here. It's just left to darkness and bats. And then once the bats have left, then they clean everything up, then they turn the light. They put the lights back in so the lights can come on and then the tours can resume.

On Wednesdays we do a short form episode, and then on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird movie on Weird House Cinema. And yes, again, sometimes those movies take place in caves.