Kartchner Caverns State Park, Show cave and state park in Cochise County, Arizona.
Kartchner Caverns is a limestone cave system within a state park in Cochise County, southern Arizona. The underground chambers lie beneath a hillside and extend across several connected rooms with varying sizes of halls and narrow passages.
Two cavers found the underground chambers in November 1974 and kept their discovery secret for several years. The Kartchner family later sold the land to the state, which began developing it into a public park during the 1990s.
The cave was code-named Xanadu after Coleridge's poem, and the 18 m column in the Throne Room was named Kubla Khan after the poem's ruler of an underground city. The name Kartchner comes from the family that owned the land and worked with the cavers for ten years. Neil Miller wrote a book about the discovery.
Several guided tours last roughly ninety minutes each and can be booked in advance. The cave environment remains consistently cool and requires sturdy shoes because of damp walkways and occasional steps.
A colony of Mexican long-nosed bats uses certain sections of the cave as a nursery during warm months. An exceptionally long formation of mineral tubes hangs from the ceiling and measures over 21 feet (6.4 meters) in length.
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