Kartchner Caverns State Park
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Kartchner Caverns State Park
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 The Big Room in the Kartchner Caverns |
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| location | Cochise County in Arizona (USA) | |
| Geographical location | 31 ° 50 ′ N , 110 ° 21 ′ W | |
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| Setup date | 1988 | |
| administration | Arizona State Parks & Trails | |
The Kartchner Caverns State Park is a state park in the US state of Arizona . It is located 14 km south of the town of Benson and around 90 km southeast of the city of Tucson and is considered the "crown jewel" among the state parks of Arizona.
The park includes most of a Paleozoic rock formation and the caves therein on the eastern flank of the Whetstone Mountains in the Coronado National Forest . The caves themselves are located in limestone and contain impressive stalactites and other speleothems , some of which have been growing for over 50,000 years.
history
The caves were apparently unknown until their discovery in 1974. Back then, two amateur cave walkers, Randy Tufts and Gary Tenen, had found a narrow crack at the bottom of a sinkhole and followed a stream of warm, moist air. They discovered a system of pristine caves more than 3 km long. To protect the caves from vandalism , the two kept the site secret for fourteen years and only spoke about the cave using the code word Xanadu , the name of an underground city from the poem "Kubla Khan" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge . Kubla Khan is the ruler of an underground city in this poem, therefore the highest formation in the "Throne Room" was also named "Kubla Khan" by the researchers. They concluded that the best way to preserve the caves near a highway would be to convert them into a show cave .
After getting the support of the Kartchner family, the landowners, and working with them for a decade, they finally realized that the best way to permanently preserve the caves was to turn to Arizona State Parks. In order to keep the exact location of the caves secret to the last, Tufts and Tenen even blindfolded the representatives of the state parks there when they introduced them to the caves. In 1985, Bruce Babbitt , then Governor of Arizona, toured the caves, squeezing through narrow passages for three hours before reaching the later show caves - including the Big Room and Echo- and cul-de-sac passages. The discovery of the caves was finally announced to the public in 1988 when the landowners sold the area to the state so that it could be converted into what would later become a state park with a show cave. Author Neil Miller retraces the story of the discovery of the Kartchner Caverns in his book of the same name.
The State of Arizona invested a total of US $ 28 million to install a system of airtight doors, humidifiers and other technical equipment to ensure the preservation of the caves. The Kartchner Caverns were opened to the public in 1999.
Visitor numbers
The caves proved very popular and had over 750,000 visitors in the first three years. That is more than twice what was envisaged in the park's master plan from 1992.
Accessible and non-public areas
The two main attractions in the public area of Kartchner Caverns are the Throne Room (= Throne Room ) and the Big Room (= Great Hall ). The Throne Room contains one of the world's longest stalactites in the form of a "soda straw" (= "drinking straw") with a length of 6.5 m and an 18 m high column called Kubla Khan . The Big Room is home to the most extensive moon milk deposits in the world. The Big Room is only accessible from October 15 to April 15 of each year as it serves as a nesting site for over 1,000 smooth-nosed bats in the remaining months .
Furthermore, the Mud Flats , the Rotunda Room , the Strawberry Room , and the Cul-de-sac Passage are publicly accessible areas of the caves.
In addition, there are numerous areas of the cave system that have not previously been made accessible to visitors. These include the Thunder Room , the Grand Canyon , the Subway Tunnel , the Mushroom Passage , the Pirate's Den , the Granite Dells and the Echo Passage .
literature
- Journal of Cave and Karst Studies. Vol. 61 (2), August 1999, ISSN 0146-9517 . (Output via the Kartchner Caves)
- Neil Miller : Kartchner Caverns - How Two Cavers Discovered and Saved One of the Wonders of the Natural World . University of Arizona Press, Tucson 2008, ISBN 978-0-8165-2516-4 .
Web links
- Kartchner Caverns State Park at Arizona State Parks & Trails
Individual evidence
- ↑ Randy Tufts, Gary Tenen: Discovery and History of Kartchner Caverns . In: Journal of Cave and Karst Studies. August 1999, p. 44ff. (PDF, accessed on April 23, 2010; 81 kB)
- ↑ Roy Rivenburg: Arizona's Deep Dark Secret . In: Los Angeles Times . November 14, 1999, p. L1 .
- ^ Barbara Yost: Underground fantasy . Arizona Republic, July 30, 2006, p. T1, T8-9 .