- kartchner from Page A Isomeone made of fiberglass," Strachan.said.
Her only disappointment: She didn't get a "cave kiss," a drop of water from the ceiling.
Dripping water is what makes Kartchner so unusual. It's a "living cave," where the formations, never touched by humans, are still growing as water deposits minerals, drop by drop.
Kartchner Caverns State Park, nine miles south of Interstate 10 at the Sierra Vista/Fort Huachuca exit, opens to the general public on Nov. 12.
Exhibits in the Discovery Center tell visitors about how the cave was formed and the creatures that live there, including bats. A multiscreen video recounts how Tucson cavers Gary Tenen and Randy Tufts discovered Kartchner in 1974, and how the park was created.
The hole that the two men shimmied down is now fenced off. The entrance for tours was cut into the hillside nearby.
Kartchner is being developed in two phases, and the second will be a separate tour with a different entrance, expected to open in two to three years.
Visitors take a tram for the quarter-mile trip up the hill from the Discovery Center to the cave. The entrance is cut into a limestone slope covered with prickly pear cache cactus spiky agave bushes and ocotillo.
Nothing could be more different from the cool, moist darkness of the cave, where the average temperature is 68 degrees and doesn't vary more than I degree year-round. Water evaporates 800 times faster in the desert, and the cave would be sucked dry within days if outside air rushed in.
To make sure that doesn't happen, visitors go through a series of three air locks.
Inside, the tour shows visitors the wide variety of playful shapes that built up over the millennia from calcium,carbonat&Ribbons of striped rock run along the ceiling, with colors that make it clear why these
formations are known as "bacon." Dainty curlicues, called helictite, curl upward in ways that seem to defy gravity.
Two large rooms the size of football fields are the highlights. The Rotunda Room has a broad floor of cracked mud, which turns into a lake during periods of heavy rain. A single path with deep footprints leads across it, the trail by Tenen and Tufts. They were careful to use the same path over and over, leaving mud flats that have never had a footprint.
A thicket of "soda straws" hangs from the ceiling at the far end of the room, and a change in lighting spotlights bow a single drop hangs at the end of each one. The straws grow as slowly as I inch every 750 years. Kartchner has one soda straw that extends 21 feet, the secondlongest in the world. To protect it, that part of the cave never will be open to tours.
The Imaginary Passage takes visitors to the Throne Room. The name for the corridor doesn't come from anything amazing about its appearance but from the fact that the engineers never imagined the route would work out.
The ornate and massive Kubla Khan column, five stories high, dominates the Throne Room. It's the one place where State Parks gets fanciful. While music wells up from hidden speakers, a light show dramatizes the spires and swirls of rock.
The reviews were mostly positive from visitors on one practice tour. However, Stefanie Cargill of Tempe, found the music "a little unnecessary."
But she praised the overall use of lighting.
"It's wonderful," she said. "The lighting allowed people to see how the water is still running on the cave formations, and I think that's really important. Nowadays, you see something shiny, it's plastic."
Cargill and others were also impressed with the elaborate steps to preserve the delicate cave environment, techniques that put the state's newest tourist attraction over budget
and off schedule.
Kartchner is opening two years later than planned. The budget ballooned to $28.4 million, nearly twothirds higher than the original estimate of $17.5 million, and State Parks may still have to add money from other department funds.
Here's the financing breakdown: 60 percent from State Parks user fees, 18 percent from the Heritage Fund (drawn from the state Lottery), 12 percent from the state general fund, 8 percent from transportation funding and the rest from other sources.
To Phoenix resident Margaret Bums, a surprising part of the tour was learning how much work it took to open the caves to the public without damaging the fragile environment.
"I was amazed at all the work that was done inside," she said. "Now I understand why it took as many years as it did. I've been at a couple of other caves. This is just. magnificent."
Kathleen Ingley may be reached at (602) 444-8171 or at kathleen.ingley@pni.com.