Kartschner Caverns

Yesterday my parents and my aunt and uncle from Texas came into town to visit. They had wanted to see Kartschner Caverns and invited us to go along with them. This was such an awesome park! And I don't mean like, "whoa totally awesome dude!" I mean it in the real sense of the word: Awesome: Amazing, awe inspiring, wonderful, magnificent, beautiful (I could keep going.) It was just absolutely gorgeous. There are two caverns that you can see, The Big Room and the Rotunda/Throne Room. We took the Rotunda/Throne Room tour.

To start you off they give you a little back history of the area. I was about to type out what I remembered and had started when I decided to check myself on the actual website of Kartschner Caverns. I thought they said it so much more brilliantly than I did so I just used their words :)

     "It all began with a drop of water. A shallow inland sea covered this area 330 million years ago, depositing layers of sediment that eventually hardened into limestone. Millions of years later this Escabrosa limestone along with other rock layers uplifted to form the Whetstone Mountains. The Escabrosa limestone, due to a type of tremor or fault, down-dropped thousands of feet relative to the mountains above.
     Rainwater, made slightly acidic by absorbing carbon dioxide from the air and soil, penetrated cracks in the down-dropped limestone block and slowly dissolved passages in it. Later, lowering groundwater levels left behind vast, air-filled rooms.
     Kartchner Caverns' wide variety of decorations, called “speleothems,” began forming drop by drop over the next 200,000 years.
     Water seeping from the surface dissolves minerals on its trip through the limestone. Once it reaches the cave, the trapped carbon dioxide escapes from the water. No longer able to hold the dissolved calcite, the drop deposits its tiny mineral load. Over time, these minerals have created the beautiful speleothems and variety of colors found in the cave. Kartchner Caverns is a “living” cave; the formations are still growing!" - (http://azstateparks.com/Parks/KACA/index.html)

See? So much smarter sounding than I could've ever done :)

The tour guides said that the founders of the cave, Gary Tenen and Randy Tufts, had discovered the caves in 1974. They were so amazed by it and it's condition that they wanted to take great lengths in preserving it. They kept it a secret for 14 years before it was made into a state park!

When you get to the entrance of the cave you come to a large steel door. They air lock the entrance to the caverns so that the wet and humid atmosphere and living ecosystem inside isn't affected by the dry AZ atmosphere outside. You go through 3 of these doors before finally entering the actual cave. The tour guide also said that the nice smoothly laid paths you walk on were built linearly (as they went) so as not to destroy the caverns. This is a picture of the cave as you first walk down the dynamited man-made hallway through the air lock doors:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ramblingrovers/1865774952/

The first room that you walk into is the Rotunda Room. We couldn't take any pictures inside but try to imagine this with me. The very first part of the room that you walk into is dizzying. Overhead is about 6 feet above you and it's at an angle so you feel like it's coming right at you! This is the only part where it felt like this though and after a quick little prayer to stop my heart beating faster than it should I was fine the rest of the way. The further we walked in the more it opened up. The "ceiling" still slanted but we walked down so it got farther away from your head and therefore felt more opened up. I forgot all about feeling "caved in." Not to mention I was loving all the beautiful formations and colors we were looking at! Like these:

http://azstateparks.com/parks/KACA/KACA_images/KACA_G_20.jpg

 They're called "Soda Straws." They're formed by the downward dripping water. They're hollow inside and when the water drips off of them it leaves deposits which is how these things grow! Or look at these stalactites and stalagmites!:

http://www.sierravistasuites.com/media/images/photo_gallery/photos/kartchner_caverns.jpg

These pictures don't do this place justice though. You must see these things in person! The whole time I was thinking of the Creation. I thought about standing next to the Savior and just going "Oooo I like that one. That's pretty!" Really cheesy I know...but I was just so grateful for the beautiful creations that we have in this world. I could've stayed there a lot longer and admired. I could've just sat there and enjoyed the silence with the water dripping in the background, basking in the beauty of the Lord's artwork. :)

The Throne Room was the last room we went into. They prep you for this one though because there's this magnificent structure in the middle of it called the Kubla Khan.

http://qtvr.arizona.edu/vrs/southwest/kartchner/kartchner_throne.jpg

It's kind of hard to see in the above picture because it's a panoramic shot but on the far right is where we came out of the Rotunda Room through Imaginary Pass. Then we went up that walk way on the right and got front row seats of that beautiful formation on the left. Don't let this small picture fool you. That formation is almost as tall as a 5 story building!

http://www.sierravistasuites.com/media/images/photos/destination/kartchner_caverns2.jpg

These are the seats that we sat on and watched the unveiling of Kubla Khan. They had lights go on and off that showed different parts of the formation and room. It was GORGEOUS!

http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2015/2337849130_922e46791b_z.jpg?zz=1

I will happily go back and do this again. I want to see The Big Room!
There's also more information (like how much construction materials they used for making the walkways and such, park history and other facts) at: http://azstateparks.com/Parks/KACA/index.html.

After coming out of the caverns we went into the little gift shop area and looked around. We also looked at the booths they had set up going over everything we'd learned inside the caverns. They also had a short film we watched about the founders and the making of Kartschner Caverns.

They had set up a little area highlighting the fact that the cave explorers had to crawl through some pretty tight spaces to get around the cave so they had 3 different holes that people could squeeze through. It was fun to try :)