Two spelunkers and a hell of a hole
KARTCHNER CAVERNS:
How Two Cavers Discovered and Saved One of the Wonders of the Natural World
By Neil Miller
214 pp. The University of Arizona Press $15.95
Reviewed by Kate Reynolds
One blustery Saturday in the year 1974, a couple of guys in southern Arizona found a hole in the ground. Ho hum, you say? Ah, but they didn’t crawl through just any old hole. It turns out that Gary Tenen and Randy Tufts made one of the most remarkable and astonishing discoveries in the age-old history of caving. What they uncovered, deep in the heart of the Whetstone Mountains, was nothing less than a pristine Southwest treasure. They discovered a cavern and called it Xanadu.
Author Neil Miller relates the tale, taking us deeper and deeper into the virgin cavern with all its secrets. The living or “wet” cave, now called Kartchner Caverns, quite possibly got its start way back in 200,000 B.C. For all those years the cave slumbered undiscovered by humans until a couple of twenty-something amateur spelunkers dropped themselves into a sinkhole and dug their way down. Tenen and Tufts spent the next years exploring the place they named after “caverns measureless to man.” Every chance they got, they donned their caving gear and headed for the hills, eager to learn more about their discovery. Each time they visited, their amazement grew. The cave they’d found was huge, bigger than anything they’d seen. And it contained wonders in every room.
But all that makes caving and discovery sound easy, as if cavers just stroll around observing stalactites and “cave bacon” and helictites around every corner. Roger W. Brucker and Richard A. Watson explain the difficulties and the mystique of caving in their book, The Longest Cave. They note that a mountain climber, for example, can actually see his progress—where he began and where he wants to go—but for a caver it’s quite different. “Within seconds you lose sight of your starting point,” they wrote,
The sinuous passages twist and turn. Always you are confined by walls, floor, and ceiling. The farthest vistas are seldom more than one hundred feet—along a passage, down a pit, up a ceiling . . . . The route is never in view except as you can imagine it in your mind.
Oh, and of course, cavers get sopping wet and slimed with mud. Then there’s the occasional rattler to deter the faint of heart.
Yet, despite all of the arduous treks underground, finding and exploring Xanadu was only the start of Tenen and Tufts’ marvelous adventure. The 1960s and ’70s have been dubbed the golden age of Arizona caving, when the sport attracted a variety of hard-core thrill seekers. But caving also attracted people without respect for the land, and the close-knit caving community deplored the vandalism and destruction that weekend looters often wreaked on Arizona caves. In some of the better known caves, careless visitors scrawled their graffiti across the rocks. Some left their trash and even took home parts of the caves as souvenirs. For this reason, Tenen and Tufts determined that “their” cave would not suffer such indignities, and Xanadu remained known to only a handful or two for nearly twenty-five years after its discovery.
So, okay, let’s say you’ve found this humungous cave and explored it. Now what? Just exactly how do you protect an enormous (about 2.4 miles long) limestone cavern situated just a few miles away from the freeway? How do you keep the cave from being claimed for mining purposes and perhaps ruined forever? And one of the knottiest problems—how do you keep a secret like that when you don’t even own the land above the cave? A single false move could jeopardize everything. The plot thickens.
After years of private explorations and careful consideration, Tenen and Tufts decided to contact the Kartchners, owners of that land. It wasn’t an easy decision; revealing their secret would put the cave at risk if the Kartchners didn’t understand, or worse, if they didn’t care.
Author Neil Miller takes the reader along as Tenen and Tufts carefully approach the Kartchners, their beards neatly trimmed, hair cut nicely so as not to offend the more conservative Kartchners. What they found was a family of warm, caring people who became full and generous partners in the efforts to preserve and protect the cave. The developing trust and friendship is one of the most endearing portions of the book. But the story doesn’t end there. No, there’s more.
Suffice it to say that the cavern is safe from vandals now and open to the public near Benson, Arizona. Saving that cave, caring for it—well, that’s the rest of the story.
I’m not likely to take up caving any time soon, and that’s why a book such as Kartchner Caverns suits arm-chair adventurers and those of us whose appreciation of swinging on ropes in the dark while wet and covered with mud is less than wholeheartedly enthusiastic. But I’m awfully glad someone else did that work and even happier that those two spelunkers proved such fine stewards. Darn, it’s a rollicking good tale.
Kartchner Caverns is a story of mystery and passion that takes the reader all the way from discovery to the eventual solution of a tricky problem. Miller’s book is beautifully illustrated with photos shot through the quarter century the Kartchners, Gary Tenen, and Randy Tufts honored their remarkable secret.
Kate Reynolds, author of Insiders’ Guide to Phoenix and co-author of Insiders’ Guide to Tucson (with Mary Paganelli), lives in Tucson, Arizona, with her husband and four cats.
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