| Kartchner Caverns State Park | |
| Arizona State Park | |
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Inside the Big Room
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| Country | United States |
|---|---|
| State | Arizona |
| Regions | (northeast)-Sonoran Desert & Madrean Sky Islands region |
| County | Cochise |
| Location | Benson |
| - elevation | 4,734 ft (1,443 m) [1] |
| - coordinates | |
| Founded | 1988 |
| Management | Arizona State Parks |
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Kartchner Caverns State Park
in San Pedro Valley of Arizona |
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Kartchner Caverns State Park is a state park of Arizona, USA, featuring a show cave with 2.4 miles (3.9 km) of passages.[1] The park is located 9 miles (14 km) south of the town of Benson and west of the north-flowing San Pedro River.
The park encompasses most of a down-dropped block of Palaeozoic rocks on the east flank of the Whetstone Mountains. The caverns are carved out of limestone and filled with spectacular speleothems which have been growing for 50,000 years or longer, and are still growing due to careful and technical cave state park development and maintenance.[2]
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The caverns were apparently unknown to humankind until 1974, when two amateur spelunkers found a narrow crack in the bottom of a sinkhole, and followed the source of warm, moist air toward what ended up being more than 2.5 miles (4.0 km) of pristine cave passages.[3] Hoping to protect the cave from vandalism, they kept the location a secret for fourteen years, deciding that the best way to preserve the cavern — which was near a freeway — was to develop it as a tour cave. After gaining the cooperation of the Kartchner family and working with them for ten years, together they decided that the best way to achieve the goal of protection through development as a tour cave was to approach Arizona State Parks. In 1985, then-Governor Bruce Babbitt secretly left the state capitol with two bodyguards and spent three hours crawling through the cave's tight passages to reach the cave's showcase chambers, including the Big Room, Echo Passage and Cul-de-sac Passage.[4] The discovery of the cave was finally made public in 1988 when the landowners sold the area to the state for development as a park and show cavern.[5] The state spent $28 million on a high-tech system of air-lock doors, misting machines and other gadgetry designed to preserve the cave.
The two major features of the caverns currently available to the public are the Throne Room and the Big Room. The Throne Room contains one of the world's longest (21 ft 2 in/6.45 m) soda straw stalactites and a 58-foot (18 m) high column called Kubla Khan, after the poem. The Big Room contains the world's most extensive formation of brushite moonmilk; it is closed during the summer for several months (April 15 to October 15) each year because it is a nursery roost for over 1,000 cave bats.[6]
Other features publicly accessible within the caverns include Mud Flats, Rotunda Room, Strawberry Room, and Cul-de-sac Passage.
Although the cave is largely uninhabited, bats do nest in the Big Room during late spring.[7]
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