Benson, AZ: Kartchner Caverns 5/13

After Tombstone we stayed at our first RV park… not bad but their showers were closed for the summer, so that kind of sucked. We improvised by using the shower in the trailer, think of your home shower and then down size it by a million, that is the tiny space we showered in! But hey at least it was a shower!
The next day we went to Kartchner Caverns State Park. I cannot even explain to you what we saw, it was incredible. So the story goes like this, in 1974 there were these two college buddies who went out looking for a cave. They had some good information that there was a sink hole somewhere in the hills near the city of Benson, AZ. So after multiple excursions to find this sink hole it wasn’t until they almost fell into it on the hike back to car that they found it. They went into the sink hole, there they found a small 6 inch hole but no signs of life behind the hole. Time went by and then they decided to go back (who knows why). This time when they went back there actually was air coming out of the 6 inch hole and it smelled like bat guano! (apparently bat guano is a good sign that there is a cave because bats live in caves…) They opened the 6 inch hole to about 12 inches and started to go through the hole (I do not know about you people but I think that this is a crazy idea!) once they got through the hole they were absolutely stunned, they were standing in a cave, a huge cave. They explored for a while and realized that NO ONE knew they were down there. They got a friend that they could trust to keep this huge secret and went back to explore further. What they ended up finding was the first cave, which they named the “Big Room” and two other rooms, “the Throne Room” and “Rotunda Room.” They kept this a secret for 14 years so they could figure out how to conserve this living cave and make it open to the public for education. Let’s just say they did it perfect, you can go into the caves and they are all still living, existing with barely any change. We couldn’t go into the “big room” because it was bat baby season, and the big room had about 500 pregnant bats! Unfortunately we were not allowed to take photos inside (apparently there had been an incident with old people shoving each other to get the perfect shot!) but we took some photos in the museum and of the postcards we got so you can see just a glimpse of what we saw.
We took a tram up to the cave entrance (they built a new entrance, it is not the sink hole they originally came in through) and then had to go through huge steel doors which keep air and bacteria out. You then get misted down to get some particles and bacteria off of you so you do not disturb the cave too much. We were not allowed to touch anything, actually our guide told us a story about a women who coughed out a cough drop and they found it a week later the size of a golf ball due to the 90% humidity. We went into the Rotunda room first, they have everything lit up in a particular way to see certain parts of the cave and keep others undisturbed. We got to see the way the guys who discovered the cave went and then we got to go into the Throne room. The Throne room was my favorite, they had these formations on the walls and ceilings that looked like BACON!!! We also got to see the one of tallest columns in the world (where stalagmites and stalactites come together), Kubla Khan. It was so beautiful.
The museum part was really neat to get the whole story on how the cave was found and how they kept it a secret. There was a part where you could try to get through the openings in the rock like the cave discoverers did, it was hard (check the photos). All in all absolutely amazing.