It wasn't an accident. It was intent with a splash of serendipity. Later somebody would say that they were just two kids chasing the smell of bat guano. Neither of them would argue with that either. One day back, oh, 26 years ago almost, Gary Tenen and Randy Tufts came to these gentle dusty hills and manoeuvred themselves down into a hole in the earth. Just another Sunday in the Whetstones, looking for caves.
Randy Tufts had been to this spot before. He'd been searching for caves since he was a high-school kid and a tiny sinkhole in the ground somewhere on the side of this hill was a little lead he had marked on a map seven years earlier, in 1967. He'd thought little about it in the meantime. This Sunday, though, a light breeze blew up from the sinkhole and that was sufficient encouragement for the boys to nuzzle their way inwards to the belly of the mountain. Gary Tenen remembers that he didn't think anything profound just then. No giant step for mankind stuff. Just another day wondering if there was any point to this at all.
They were 50 miles from Tucson, Arizona when they went into the earth. Hours later they were a million miles from anywhere and their lives had changed forever.
They call themselves speluncars and what they do is what claustrophobia is all about. Crawling into holes that startled snakes would think twice about bolting into. Crawling into holes and not knowing whether or not they'll ever emerge.
That day they crawled and wiggled and pushed for maybe three hours, making their way into the heart of the mountain, sliding, prying themselves over mud and water and rock. "The trash-can in the corner of my office, most of the time we were crawling through something of about those dimensions," says Gary Tenen.
This is matter-of-fact stuff for a guy who trained for his hobby by wriggling his frame through coat hangers.
They came eventually to what they describe as an office-sized room. Its dimensions had been tampered with by Alice in Wonderland. The ceiling was 18 inches from the floor.
Their carbide lamps revealed a small hole in the far corner of the office. They squeezed inside and manipulated their tired bodies through another 20 feet of vein. Then came nothing except a grapefruit-sized hole. They crawled towards it and suddenly a guano scented breeze blew their lamps out. Conventionally it is at that point that people scream, that Scooby Doo leaps into his owner's arms, that jagged violin music fills the theatre.
Gary Tufts and Randy Tenen rejoiced. Down there in the profound darkness, they giggled, their bodies pumped with adrenaline. The rush of air suggested strongly that beyond the grapefruit sized hole lay a cave.
The doorway between two worlds. All that sat between them and their own private wonderland was a little work with an 8 lb hammer, another tunnel 50 feet long, then a passage some 300 feet long and then . . .
Gary Tenen and Randy Tufts have been friends for 30 years. The quality of friendship between men who search for caves together is barely fathomable. Hours spent crawling on the belly in pure darkness through the Earth's tight intestines tends to breed uncommon trust and comradeship.
What they found was pristine. What they found was so wondrous and so huge it would bind the two of them together like a geological formation for the next quarter of a century.
Rarely does it fall to anyone to be the first to set foot anywhere, but that day and for thousands upon thousands of hours in the following years Tufts and Tenen tiptoed through one of the great natural wonders. Apart from one sloth who died in there 80,000 years ago, theirs were the first footprints.
The caverns covered two and a half miles; the layout was labyrinthine, crazy. Two rooms as large as football fields and at least 100 foot high, and 26 smaller rooms, full of geological treasure. The ceilings are a rococo festival of geological creativity hung with every assortment of helactite, stalactite and nameless shape. The floors grow up from the earth in crystal tumours and sturdy columns and millions of little phalli.
The Kartchner Caverns are a wonder unlike almost any on Earth. The first room which Tenen and Tufts discovered they christened Xanadu, and for an impulse naming they captured the essence of the place perfectly. Coleridge's caverns measureless to man must have come from a dream of this place. Possibly laudanum was involved. This is the cover of a Yes concept album from the early 1970s brought to life.
Stalactites and stalagmites hundreds of thousands of years in the making present themselves in novel forms everywhere. Through the centuries, through the millenniums, water has seeped in here, laden with minerals by the time it drips from the ceiling. In some cases it has created fantastically long, thin, narrow tubes known as soda straws. They grow an inch every 750 years and the longest in Kartchner is 21 feet long. Great translucent clusters of them hang like ominous, glowing curtains.
The walls are decorated richly with helactites, beautifully cast shapes formed by water seeping through tiny capillaries in the rock. These present themselves like vast, ghostly sheets hanging from the ceiling. Abundant also are long strips of "cave bacon" - colourful formations created by water which, having absorbed iron deposits, has seeped slowly down the sloping ceiling of the cavern. They hang there now like giant rashers. There are mounds of white crystallised flowstone known as cave popcorn, huge surreal formations in the shapes of shields, fried eggs and a huge, 60-foot column called Kubla Khan.
Standing in one of the huge rooms, looking across the surreal melted wax landscape, you absorb a sharp lesson about human transience. Even the pile of bat guano staining the mud has been there for 40,000 years.
The caverns bulge with freakish beauty. It took Tufts and Tenen a year of visits (marking their path Hansel and Gretel-like with ice-pop sticks) before they finally covered every inch of the place. It will take Arizona another couple of years before all the rooms are ready for the public. To date, the cost of opening the rooms has run at $27,000 per square foot.
Concrete paths have been laid without using compressors or combustion. Low wattage lighting has been installed discreetly and tested so as not to remove moisture from the air, which at 98 per cent humidity gives the caverns their living personality.
Humidifiers using only well-water keep the air as it has been for thousands of years. The challenge is to compensate the caves for the air that human bodies and clothing steal on every visit. Monitoring stations measure how much water is evaporating or condensing at any given time. The cave is one of less than a dozen living, wet caves in the world. Many people think it is the finest.
When the caves opened to the public at the end of last year, Randy Tufts and Gary Tenen thought of the metaphor that had often been used through the quarter century since they discovered these caverns. Their child had grown up and was leaving home. Back in 1974, they had decided this was how ultimately they would want it to happen. First, though, they kept it all secret for 14 years. They couldn't stand the thought of somebody tousling this perfect world.
"It didn't take us long to become hermetic about it," says Randy Tufts "We seldom even used the `cave' word. We were obsessively secretive. We were known amongst cavers in Arizona for hiking in that region and just the idea that people might know we'd found something - well, they'd probably know whereabouts straight away. So we didn't talk about it at all. That first day we had to stop in the rooms and turn back. Nobody on Earth knew where we were.
"We were in awe, but we knew if we fell into some deep hole that would be it. Dead and never found. Eventually we told one roommate, one friend. They also kept the secret for all these years but they had to know, so that if anything happened to us they could come and rescue us quietly."
They squeezed their adult lives into the spaces between visits to this damp, thriving place.
"The sense of responsibility hit us quickly," says Gary Tenen. "We knew enough about caving. So many caves have been vandalised, spray-painted, destroyed. The two of us who found the place, we were the only people who would control that. With discovery came an obligation. How to deal with this? It's so fragile we can't have cavers through here, the traffic would be enormously disruptive. Eventually we looked at our fears concerning the caves' proximity to the main road, etc and decided these were advantages if we could turn it into a treasure, into something people wanted to protect."
Easier said than done. Fast forward a few years: in 1978 Tufts and Tenen invited an expert called Orion Knoxs to survey the cave and draw the first map of the caverns. The Kartchner family who own the land upon which, or under which, Randy and Gary had been trespassing for four years became involved now in a supportive way. James Kartchner had purchased this land for cattle-grazing back in 1941 and often when riding with one or other of his 12 children he would comment that the sound of the horse hooves on the hill suggested to him that the hill was hollow. News of what lay beneath drew the Kartchners into collusion almost immediately.
The gorgeous, obsessive, hidden, madness of it ate away at them. Gary took off four months from his job and worked elsewhere under an alias at a commercial cave, taking note of how they handled tourists and preserved the cave. Randy moved in with Gary and his wife for two years, running an office from their home from where he would broker negotiations with the State Park people. When they went on caving expeditions or to conferences they used aliases in case, through contacts, other local cavers would trace the source of their excitement.
Tufts and Tenen had, after some time, approached Arizona State Parks and told the authorities what they had discovered. It was like describing Dali to a blind man. The civil servants said: "Well boys, that's real interesting. We've taken a note of this and if anything comes of this in the future you may be informed."
Things got desperate. Tenen and Tufts spent thousands of hours in the caves, awestruck, humbled, working away while becoming feverishly obsessive about not leaving any traces which might pollute the place or invite disaster upon it.
State officials who were interested were blindfolded, bundled into a car and brought to the site of the caves. To no avail.
Finally, a friend of Randy Tufts prevailed on a friend who worked in the governor of Arizona's office to persuade the governor to meet Tufts and Tenen in Tucson. The governor would be informed of the reason for the meeting when he got there.
And so Bruce Babbitt, on the eve of the announcement of his candidacy for the presidency of the United States, crawled three and a half hours through mud tunnels with Tufts and Tenen until he could see Xanadu and beyond for himself.
"He was kind of hard to read," remembers Randy Tufts. "He was a trained geologist and quite athletic so he was able for the ordeal, but he's reserved and kind of cerebral and it was tough to guess what he was thinking. It showed more in his actions later."
Babbitt guided Tufts and Tenen through the tunnels he knew best, those of the Arizona State Legislature. In 1988, the State of Arizona purchased the land from the Kartchner family and Babbitt ushered through dummy legislation which allowed for the development of the caves as a state park. Only six of those voting even knew of the existence of the caves or of Babbitt's ultimate intention.
Today, the entrance through which tourists enter the many airlocked chambers which lead to the Kartchner Caverns is called the Babbitt Hole. Fitting testimony, given that the State of Arizona has invested $28 million so far in turning this dreamworld into a resource.
The money will flow back to Arizona like a flash flood. Interest so far has been phenomenal. Tufts and Tenen have become minor celebrities. Arizonans like to point out that men walked on the moon before Tufts and Tenen walked in Kartchner.
For his part, Randy Tufts's professional life has been almost as fulfilling. He discovered a fault line the size of the San Andreas fault on the planet Jupiter. A family interest in Ireland and Celtic mythology has led to him christening various areas with Celtic or Irish names. The most interesting part of the planet is now known to those who study it as Connemara Chaos. Nothing replaces the cave in his imagination though.
"For years I had a whole series of different kinds of cave dreams. I used to have recurring nightmares, always a variation on the same dream, somebody had taken the cave over and turned it into a warehouse or a theme bar and I was always trying to sneak in there undetected to rescue the caves. Finally I started telling people about the dreams. They went away."
Gary Tenen feels often the weight of metaphor that people have used so often. The caverns are a child.
"I suppose we've handed the place over now. We still care for it, though. I think we'll always be watching, making sure the cave is being taken care of. We owe that. You know, on the day they opened the place up I remember looking back over the 25 years - Randy and I and all the things we got up to, the friendship, the fights with each other. A chair got thrown once, it was just stuff that happened, but looking back in November it came to me. It all makes a darn good story."