Friday, January 4, 2008

Arizona's Kartchner Caverns State Park

Members of my family did the two public tours at Kartchner Caverns (KC), near Benson, Arizona, on the afternoon of January 3, 2008. Dorine, our daughter Kiley, and I did the "Big Room" tour, and our daughter Kristy and her kids Nicole, Zach, and Alexis did the "Rotunda Room" tour. It is a nice cave, with some very pretty and interesting formations, and the state has done an impressive job of developing the cave for public use while still preserving the underground environment. In terms of scale, KC appears to be about an order of magnitude smaller than Carlsbad Caverns, although it's hard to gauge how grand the former is from just one half-mile walking tour. I would place it roughly on par with Slaughter Canyon Cave in Carlsbad Caverns National Park, although Slaughter Canyon Cave still has much-larger and prettier formations than anything I saw in the "Big Room" in KC. Reportedly, KC has a more-varied mineralogy than all but a few caves in the world, but it must be said that if it had been discovered in New Mexico (which has many more cave resources than Arizona), it would not have been deemed of sufficient interest for public-use development, and thus it would almost certainly be in the domain of the BLM and visited still by only a few well-connected cavers. Truth be told, no cave in New Mexico will ever be developed again in the same way as KC or Carlsbad Caverns.

(By the way, I am certainly related to the Kartchners who originally owned the land, and for whom the cave and park are named, as we all are descended from William Decatur Kartchner, my great-great grandfather; however, I'm not sure of the exact relationship, as it isn't very close. They're probably my third cousins once-removed or something, and, since I don't really even know all of my first cousins....)